Use Your Phone’s LiDAR/Camera to 'See' Wi-Fi Dead Zones

The Problem With Traditional Wi-Fi Heatmaps

Classic Wi-Fi survey tools plot signal strength on a static 2D floor plan you have to draw or upload yourself, then walk around tapping a dot on the map at each measurement point. It works, but it's fiddly and easy to misplace a point on the map relative to where you actually are. Augmented reality changes the workflow: instead of manually placing points on a flat drawing, your phone uses its camera (and, on Pro-tier iPhones and iPads, a LiDAR scanner) to build a live 3D understanding of the room, then pins signal readings directly onto the real-world space as you walk — so the "map" is the room itself, viewed through your camera.

What You'll Need

• An iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 13+ for ARKit support (LiDAR models give the best results but aren't required), or a recent Android phone with ARCore support.
• An app that combines Wi-Fi signal scanning with AR overlay. WiFiman by Ubiquiti (free, iOS and Android) includes an AR Wi-Fi mapping mode that overlays live signal strength indicators as you move through a space. Dedicated site-survey tools like NetSpot also offer heatmapping features, though their AR-specific capabilities vary by platform and version — check the app's current feature list before relying on it.
• Good ambient lighting — AR surface tracking degrades in the dark regardless of whether you have LiDAR.

Walking Through an AR Wi-Fi Survey

1. Open the AR-capable Wi-Fi app and grant it camera and location permissions — Android requires location access to read nearby Wi-Fi scan results, and iOS requires camera access for the AR overlay.
2. Start the AR mapping/scan mode and slowly pan the camera around the starting room so the app can establish its spatial anchor and build an initial mesh of the space.
3. Walk through your home or office at a normal pace, holding the phone up as if recording video. The app continuously samples signal strength (RSSI) from your connected Wi-Fi network and drops color-coded markers in the AR view — typically green for strong signal, yellow for marginal, red for weak or no signal.
4. Cover every room, including corners and areas behind furniture or walls where you suspect weak coverage — these are usually the spots worth testing since they're the ones a flat 2D heatmap tends to under-represent.
5. Once you've covered the space, switch to the app's overview or "top-down" mode if available, which reconstructs the AR data into a more traditional heatmap you can save or share.

Interpreting the Results

• Consistent red zones near exterior walls or a garage: normal — building materials like brick, concrete, and stucco attenuate 5GHz signal heavily; expect weaker coverage there regardless of router placement.
• A red zone directly behind your router: a strong sign the router itself is mounted low, behind furniture, or inside a cabinet, blocking its own coverage in that direction — routers radiate roughly omnidirectionally, so anything absorbing signal on one side shows up as a dead zone there.
• Multiple disconnected weak zones across a larger home: this is the classic case for a mesh Wi-Fi system rather than trying to relocate a single router — use the map to decide where a satellite/node should sit, ideally in a spot with moderate (yellow) signal from the main router so the node has a solid backhaul link.

Turning the Map Into an Action Plan

1. Identify the room(s) with the worst readings and check what's physically between them and your router — thick walls, metal (mirrors, appliances, ductwork), and large fish tanks are common, easy-to-miss culprits.
2. If you're adding a mesh node, place it at the edge of a yellow zone, not deep inside a red one — a node with a weak backhaul connection to the main router will bottleneck the whole mesh.
3. Re-run the AR scan after making a change (moving the router, adding a node, switching a channel) to confirm it actually helped rather than assuming it did.