Point and Shoot 3D Modeling (Video)

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

Comments

Software equivilant

[Anonymous Coward]

If you already have a Kinect (or other) sensor and a laptop, this can be achieved with Skanect (http://skanect.manctl.com/).

Local Control of your 3D data

[Guano_Jim]

This looks a lot like Autodesk's 123D Catch, but the bonus here is you don't have to sign up for an account with Autodesk.

I for one would be pretty excited to have my 3D scan data local, so I don't have to wait for Autodesk's cloud to do the processing or have my scans tracked by a third party. I'm kind of not cool with Autodesk having a model of the inside of my bedroom, for instance.

I once did a 123D scan of a model sculpted out of banana bread: http://zheng3.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/yes-we-have-no-bananas/ --the resolution's OK but I don't think I'd use this technology for anything that I planned to deform or edit too much. The geometry's just too dense to work with easily.