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Who Wants a 3D Scanner, Anyway?
splineboy asks: "In June 2002 a sun-starved computer engineer walked into a small room armed with an old PC, a 20 year-old video camera, some lasers, glass rods and an awful lot of duct tape. His mission was to create a program capable of converting a real world object into a computer model that could be manipulated, stored and eventually reproduced using stereolithography. After several hours of gluing, taping and generally walloping things with a hammer, Project Splinescan was born. Originally running on a batterd old machine (AMD-500), the prototype scanner proved the concept of low cost 3D scanning with a few rough scans. Now that a stable, multi-platform 3D scanning solution is on the horizon (even high school kids are building their own) - a question rings clear through the ether: 'OK, you proved you can make it work, but what's it good for?'"
"What are the potential uses of a portable, low cost 3D scanner? Medical? Animation? Special Effects? Archeology? Ceramics? Lego Modelling? I've got my ideas about why 3D scanning seems to be getting so popular, but how would you like to see these projects developed in the future?"
Unfortunately, soon after his triumph, his most brilliant computer game designs were stolen by one of his company's executives, who passed them off as his own. After breaking into the corporate building and hacking into the computer network to attempt to locate evidence of the theft, he mysteriously vanished, and was not heard from for some time. Eventually, he resurfaced, spouting wild tales about 'talking to programs' and 'surviving the game grid', but bearing concrete evidence of the executive's misdeeds. The prevailing explanation for his bizzare behavior is chronic drug abuse. Whatever the reason, he persists in such delusional beliefs to this day.
Find out more about his tragic story in this compelling and informative docudrama.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
"Just remove all your clothes, and step in front of the, errm, laser scanner, madam - it will take your pict- I mean, measurements, so we can have a perfect model of you..."
Aim Penis size bragging: "You wanna see the scan of my wang, baby?" D
Think of the possibilities of photocopying in 3D! Not duplication or replication, but copying the outside of an object such as a... well... something with nothing important on the inside. But it would be cool.