Scanning Real-World Object and generating 3D Mesh from it

RealityKit 2.0 | Object Capture API

Object Capture API, announced at WWDC 2021, provides you with the long-awaited tools for photogrammetry. At the output we get USDZ model with a hi-res texture.

Read about photogrammetry HERE.

ARKit | Mesh Reconstruction

Using iOS device with LiDAR and ARKit 3.5/4.0/5.0 you can easily reconstruct a topological map of surrounding environment. Scene Reconstruction feature starts working immediately after launching a current ARSession.

Apple LiDAR works within 5 meters range. A scanner can help you improve a quality of ZDepth channel, and such features as People/Real World Objects Occlusion, Motion Tracking, Immediate Physics Contact Body and Raycasting.

Other awesome peculiarities of LiDAR scanner are:

• you can use your device in a poorly lit room
• you can track a pure white walls with no features at all
• you can detect a planes almost instantaneously

Consider that a quality of a scanned object when you're using LiDAR isn't as good as you expect. Small details are not scanned. That's because a resolution of an Apple LiDAR isn't high enough.

You answered your own question with a quote from Apple's documentation:

An ARReferenceObject contains only the spatial feature information needed for ARKit to recognize the real-world object, and is not a displayable 3D reconstruction of that object.

If you run that sample code, you can see for yourself the visualizations it creates of the reference object during scanning and after a test recognition — it's just a sparse 3D point cloud. There's certainly no photogrammetry in what Apple's API provides you, and there'd not much to go on in terms of recovering realistic structure in a mesh.

That's not to say that such efforts are impossible — there have been some third parties demoing Here photogrammetry experiments based on top of ARKit. But

1. that's not using ARKit 2 object scanning, just the raw pixel buffer and feature points from ARFrame.

2. the level of extrapolation in those demos would require non-trivial original R&D, as it's far beyond the kind of information ARKit itself supplies.