Overview of the Foundation’s research programme — the questions it addresses, the contributions it makes, and the architecture of the work in progress. Offered as an invitation to engagement from researchers, practitioners, regulatory bodies, and adopters working in adjacent fields.
Natural philosophy
The Foundation’s work rests on an old observation that has, over the last forty years, become literal: we do not measure space — we measure time, and infer space from it.
Since 1983 the metre has had no independent definition; it is the distance light travels in a fixed fraction of a second. The 2019 revision of the International System of Units completed the move, anchoring very nearly every unit to the second through fixed constants of nature. The reason is necessity rather than convention: frequency is the only physical quantity that can be counted rather than compared against a reference, and counting does not drift. Time is held today to parts in 1018, where no other quantity comes close, so metrology routes everything it can through frequency — and the modern instrument touches durations and trusts the speed of light to do the translating. A satellite fixes its position from clock differences; an interferometer reads a passing gravitational wave as a change in light’s travel time; a laser scanner renders a room from the delays of its own returning echoes. In each case distance is the reconstruction and duration is the datum. Time is the canvas; space is the paint.
This is the natural-philosophical ground beneath the programme. If space is something a measurement system reconstructs rather than reads directly from the world, then the integrity of spatial evidence is the integrity of that reconstruction — and the programme’s central question follows from it: under what conditions may a reconstruction of space, built from measured time, be trusted as evidence? The architecture set out here is an answer. Its instruments measure durations and rebuild the residential interior from them; its evidentiary discipline is the work of making that reconstruction faithful, signed, and auditable, so that a verified spatial claim carries its provenance back to the incorruptible datum beneath it. The Foundation’s contribution to accessibility assessment is, at root, a contribution to the trustworthiness of an inference that modern measurement now makes in almost every act.
The Foundation pursues these foundations in their own right, in a companion body of natural-philosophical enquiry into the primacy of time and the constructed character of space. That work is held to a different standard than the architecture described here and is not a premise of it; it is the intellectual root from which the programme’s understanding of measurement has grown, offered in the same spirit of open, graded, and falsifiable enquiry.
1. What this programme is about
The Metrological Research Foundation’s research programme develops the technical, regulatory, and institutional architecture for treating scan-based spatial evidence as verifiable in compliance verification and accessibility assessment workflows.
The motivating context is the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s Complex Home Modifications pathway in Australia, in which assessments of residential accessibility currently depend on manual measurement and inter-rater judgement. The inaugural paper of the programme, Measuring what matters (May 2026), documented the costs of this approach and made the case for scan-based evidence as a more reliable foundation. The programme that follows builds the architecture under which such evidence can be produced, verified, regulated, and trusted at the scale the scheme requires.
The work is not limited to accessibility assessment. The architecture is general to any context where spatial measurements need evidentiary standing — dimensional compliance verification under building codes, post-occupancy auditing of completed works, dispute resolution in construction and modification contracts, forensic analysis of built-environment claims. Accessibility assessment is the application that drives the programme; the broader applicability is a consequence of the architecture rather than an additional goal.
2. The structure of the programme
The programme is organised into three stacks, with a synthesis specification connecting them and a policy foundation grounding the whole:
SYNTHESIS Smart-Data specification | ||
| DepthPano | SpaceGen | Proof of Authority |
| Proof of Place | Proof of Model | Proof of Trust |
POLICY FOUNDATION Measuring what matters | ||
The policy foundation, Measuring what matters, is published. The architectural papers are in active development. The Smart-Data specification is in working-document form, with its first formal release planned alongside the early architectural papers.
2.1 The architectural papers
Six papers in active development form the architectural core of the programme. Each addresses a distinct aspect of the evidentiary problem; together they articulate a complete architecture from raw scan data through to forensically auditable evidence.
- DepthPano
An operational depth-image format for web-native delivery of terrestrial laser scan data. The paper documents a working implementation applied to indoor residential scanning at scheme scale, with benchmark results characterising the file-size and query-performance trade-offs of the architectural choices. Honest comparison with established alternatives positions the format relative to the broader 2D-projection family for pointcloud data.
View the paper: DepthPano: An operational image format delivering web-native residential scans
- SpaceGen
The foundational principle for extracting the architectural envelope — floor, walls, ceiling — from a single scan position. The paper documents a principle the Foundation has refined across more than a decade of operational practice and several generations of implementation, and the engineering work that made it robust against the variability of real residential interiors. SpaceGen connects the raw-measurement format to the cross-scan reconstruction method.
- Proof of Authority
The regulatory chain through which scan-based evidence acquires standing. The paper addresses how technical signatures connect to the established structures of professional registration, jurisdictional attribution, and site identification, with particular attention to the Australian context in which the inaugural paper’s recommendations land.
- Proof of Place
The cryptographic architecture for signing, verifying, and auditing the Pano Bundle. The paper develops the trust model under which a scan can be relied upon as evidence: what the signature attests to, who can verify it, what the chain of custody looks like, and how the architecture handles the threat scenarios that compliance-grade evidence must withstand.
- Proof of Model
The architectural reconstruction methodology that converts per-scan-position spatial data into registered building models exportable to industry-standard BIM formats. The paper documents a methodology refined across a decade of operational practice, including its relationship to conventional pointcloud-registration approaches and the integration with the broader evidentiary architecture.
- Proof of Trust
The institutional governance under which the evidentiary architecture operates. The paper addresses the resilience properties the architecture needs to survive catastrophic trust failures, the comparative governance models available, and the relationship between technical infrastructure and institutional credibility in long-horizon evidentiary systems.
2.2 The synthesis specification
The Smart-Data specification ties the architectural work to the policy case from the inaugural paper. The specification articulates the properties that scan-based spatial data must carry to be relied upon as evidence in compliance verification: verifiability (cryptographically grounded), anchoring to authority (regulatory chain), self-interpretation (carrying both measurements and the algorithmic interpretation of them), and forensic auditability (supporting tamper-evident analysis).
The specification will be released in two versions. Version 1.0 accompanies the early architectural papers and articulates the four properties above. Version 2.0, released later in the programme, incorporates refinements that emerge from the architectural work and may extend the property set as appropriate.
2.3 The policy foundation
Measuring what matters (Tong & Bosdriesz, May 2026) is the policy paper that motivates the architectural programme. It documents the inter-rater variability of current accessibility assessment practice, the clinical-to-construction handover gap that current spatial data formats do not address, and the scheme-scale resource implications of an evidentiary architecture that cannot reliably verify spatial claims. The paper’s recommendations call on the NDIA, the Australian Building Codes Board, state professional registration bodies, and standards organisations to develop the regulatory, technical, and operational frameworks that scan-based evidence requires. The architectural programme provides the technical contribution to that broader effort.
3. Individual research papers alongside the architectural programme
Alongside the architectural papers, the Foundation produces operational, methodological, and applied research that complements the architectural work. This category includes papers documenting the Foundation’s end-to-end workflow for accessibility assessment, methodology papers on survey practice and field operations, and applied papers on specific compliance contexts where the architecture is being applied. These papers extend the Foundation’s contribution into adjacent research areas without diluting the architectural focus of the programme’s core.
Topics in this category are released as opportunities and operational maturity allow. Researchers and practitioners with adjacent interests are welcome to engage on possible collaborations.
4. Open architecture
The Foundation’s methods are in the public domain. The architectural techniques the programme documents — the depth-image format, the cryptographic architecture, the architectural-envelope extraction principle, the topological registration approach — are openly published as the papers release, with reference implementations available to adopters who wish to build conformant tooling.
This stance reflects a deliberate position about how research infrastructure in compliance verification should work. Verifiable spatial evidence is too important to be controlled by any single organisation. Open architecture means the Foundation’s contribution can be built on, adapted, extended, or replaced by other groups as the field matures. The Foundation’s value comes from operational experience and ongoing contribution, not from controlling adoption.
Adopters, implementers, and researchers building on this work are welcome. The Foundation will provide reference materials, engagement support, and ongoing collaboration as the programme develops.
5. How the papers relate to each other
Each paper in the architectural programme builds on what its predecessors establish. The relationships are not strict dependencies in the sense that reading any paper requires reading the others first — each is self-contained — but the cumulative argument is what the programme as a whole develops.
At the foundation of the architecture sit the format and the cryptographic substrate. DepthPano documents how the spatial measurements are encoded; Proof of Place documents how the encoded measurements are signed, verified, and bound to provenance metadata. These two papers establish what a verifiable, signed Pano Bundle is, technically.
The geometric story has two halves. SpaceGen documents how the architectural envelope — floor, walls, ceiling — is extracted from a single scan position. Proof of Model documents how those per-scan-position primitives are registered across multiple positions into a complete building model. Together with DepthPano they form the programme’s three-stack technical architecture: a Measurements stack (DepthPano), a Spaces stack of within-scan interpretation (SpaceGen), and a cross-scan Model stack (Proof of Model).
Around this technical core sit the regulatory and governance layers. Proof of Authority documents how technical signatures connect to professional, jurisdictional, and site-level standing. Proof of Trust documents the institutional infrastructure under which the architecture operates and the resilience properties it requires. These papers establish how the technical artefacts acquire regulatory meaning and institutional durability.
The Smart-Data specification ties these together as a coherent picture: a conformant Smart-Data artefact carries the verifiability, the authority anchoring, the self-interpretation, and the forensic auditability properties that the architectural papers collectively develop, organised around the three-stack technical architecture. The specification is the working framework under which the architecture operates as a whole, not the sum of its parts.
6. Sequence and timing
The programme is sequenced over approximately three years. The papers publish in an order that reflects two considerations: the order in which their substantive arguments depend on each other (each paper is more compelling once its predecessors are published), and the readiness of each paper at the time it is sequenced (some papers are closer to publication than others, and the order reflects this).
DepthPano and SpaceGen are the next papers to publish, following the inaugural Measuring what matters. The Smart-Data specification v1.0 follows close behind. The remaining architectural papers — Proof of Authority, Proof of Place, Proof of Model, and Proof of Trust — publish across the following years of the programme. Individual research papers in the complementary category are released as opportunities allow.
Exact publication timing depends on review cycles at the target venues, on collaborator availability for papers that involve external partners, and on the operational priorities of the Foundation. The programme as a whole is in active development; the specific timing of each paper is communicated when submission is imminent.
7. Where the work is published
Each paper is being prepared for a venue appropriate to its contribution and audience. The technical papers (DepthPano, SpaceGen, Proof of Place, Proof of Model) target AEC technology and information security venues where the contributions can be evaluated by readers with the relevant expertise. The regulatory paper (Proof of Authority) targets policy and regulatory journals where the audience includes the regulatory bodies whose engagement the programme invites. The governance paper (Proof of Trust) targets institutional and governance literature. SpaceGen targets AEC technology and computer vision venues where its operational engineering contribution can be evaluated.
The Smart-Data specification is released as a Foundation working document with a citable identifier, on the same model as standards specifications in other technical domains. As the field engagement with the specification matures, more formal venue release may be appropriate.
8. Engagement
The programme is offered as an invitation to engagement. The Foundation welcomes engagement from researchers working on adjacent problems in spatial computing, verifiable evidence systems, accessibility methodology, and built-environment compliance; from practitioners adopting or considering scan-based methods in their own work; from regulatory bodies developing the policy frameworks that scan-based evidence will operate under; and from adopters building tooling that uses or extends the architecture.
Specific opportunities for engagement include co-authorship on individual research papers (§3), implementation feedback on reference materials, comment on draft specifications before formal release, and discussion of how the architecture fits or differs from the engagement party’s own context. The Foundation’s programme operates more effectively with sustained external engagement than as an isolated research effort, and the contributions it makes are stronger when they have been tested against the perspectives of the field.
Contact details and engagement channels are available through the Foundation’s website.
9. Closing observation
This programme exists because verifiable spatial evidence for residential accessibility assessment is too important to be left to ad hoc approaches. The work the Foundation has accumulated over more than a decade of operational practice has matured to the point where it warrants careful articulation in the published literature — not as proprietary advantage but as contribution to the field that the field can build on.
The architectural papers, the synthesis specification, and the individual research papers will publish progressively over the coming years. As they do, the programme’s contribution will become more concrete; for now, the structure is offered as a map of where the work is going and an invitation to those whose perspectives can make it better.