---
title: "The AR Measuring Box: Etsy's answer to Big Tape Measure"
description: "Etsy extended its iOS Wall View experience into an AR measuring tool that represents listings as scaled 3D boxes, allowing shoppers to judge an item's size and fit in their space. The work addressed the difficulty of creating models for millions of customizable, often handmade items by improving dimension extraction instead. A server-side regex parser reads titles, descriptions, customization information, overviews, and variations, handling unit variants, localization, special characters, fractions, conversions, complex imperial measurements, and duplicate values while prioritizing structured fields and caching results. In iOS, the measuring box uses SceneKit’s SCNBox and SCNNode labels, supports movement and rotation, and uses LiDAR-derived meshes for environment occlusion. The resulting feature adds real-size AR functionality to nearly a million Etsy items, viewed by tens of thousands of users weekly."
---

# The AR Measuring Box: Etsy's answer to Big Tape Measure

[Etsy](https://yomu.fyi/company/etsy) · Pedro Michel · Sep 18, 2023

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Etsy extended its iOS Wall View experience into an AR measuring tool that represents listings as scaled 3D boxes, allowing shoppers to judge an item's size and fit in their space. The work addressed the difficulty of creating models for millions of customizable, often handmade items by improving dimension extraction instead. A server-side regex parser reads titles, descriptions, customization information, overviews, and variations, handling unit variants, localization, special characters, fractions, conversions, complex imperial measurements, and duplicate values while prioritizing structured fields and caching results. In iOS, the measuring box uses SceneKit’s SCNBox and SCNNode labels, supports movement and rotation, and uses LiDAR-derived meshes for environment occlusion. The resulting feature adds real-size AR functionality to nearly a million Etsy items, viewed by tens of thousands of users weekly.

## Context

Etsy wanted to expand its Wall View AR experience beyond wall art, but creating 3D models for millions of customizable items would be a huge undertaking. Sellers also supplied dimensions inconsistently across structured and free-form fields, making reliable size information difficult to obtain.

## Approach / What changed

Etsy moved dimension parsing to an API backend, expanded regex handling for units, languages, fractions, conversions, and variations, then cached and backfilled parsed results. The iOS app presents each listing as a SceneKit box with labels, movement, rotation, and LiDAR-based environment occlusion.

## Takeaways

- The server-side parser handles plural and localized units, incorrect spellings, special quotation characters, fraction ligatures, parenthesized conversions, and complex imperial measurements.
- Structured dimension fields are prioritized over free-form text, while duplicate dimensions are de-duplicated and variation-specific dimensions are retained because they correlate more directly with prices.
- SceneKit creates and labels the scaled measuring box, while LiDAR-derived meshes let real-world furniture and surfaces occlude it during AR sessions.

**Tags:** [iOS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ios), [LiDAR](https://yomu.fyi/topic/lidar)

- Source: [Etsy](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/the-ar-measuring-box-etsys-answer-to-big-tape-measure)
- Source URL: https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/the-ar-measuring-box-etsys-answer-to-big-tape-measure
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T16:02:13.995Z

[Read original post](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/the-ar-measuring-box-etsys-answer-to-big-tape-measure)