Sit up straight! Grit those teeth! DON’T MOVE. Here’s just one of the many items we missed in our predictions for this year. Hand-held camera scanners. We saw a slew of prototypes last year, from devices tied into a Kinect, like ReconstructMe, to slick, smaller versions like the ARMADA concept. Lynx Laboratories is preparing to launch a Kickstarter project on January 15th that will finally bring a more consumer-friendly version to the scan space.
Lynx Hand-held Camera Scanner
Your mug scanned up in sweet bits of full-color polygon bliss is just one aspect of the Lynx scanner. The Texas-based team is aimed at capturing entire environments and recording motion. From their video page:
A polygon model is constructed in real-time as you move the camera around a scene. Just as quickly as a regular video camera obtains 2D data, the Lynx A camera builds the model and tracks its location in space. The scene model information was compressed and exported into Revit, where architects can then take measurements or modify the scene as they see fit.
Ohhhhh yeah, you know this is the future, but wait. What about your mobile phone as a capture device? Autodesk 123D Catch and the newly release Cubify Capture leave you to snapping photos to reconstruct your setting, but Trimensional has already brought a 0.99 iPhone app that allows you to capture, browse, view and export to OBJ, STL, or PLY. Perhaps it’s a question of accuracy, but either way, hand-held scanning is still rich for development. Video of the Lynx A in Action below.
Update! If you haven’t already, get in on the Lynx Kickstarter project!
Via Engadget
