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Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says
merbs writes: In just a few years, we could see the mass proliferation of DIY, smartphone-enabled replicators. At least, Caltech electrical engineering professor Ali Hajimiri and his team of researchers thinks so. They've developed a very tiny, very powerful 3D imager that can easily fit in a mobile device, successfully tested its prowess, and published the high-res results (PDF) in the journal Optics. Hajimiri claims the imager may soon allow consumers to snap a photo of just about anything, and then, with a good enough 3D printer, use it to create a real-life replica "accurate to within microns of the original object."
And you thought dick pics were a problem...
Bad headline: "Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says"
Good headline: "Smartphone-Enabled 3-D Scanners Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says"
Is a replicator sensor on a phone really that useful? A camera is nice to have around all the time and even that often isn't used much by many phone owners. Yes, this thing is small but space is at a premium on phones. How often do you look at something and say "I wish I could create a mediocre quality 3D printed version of this"?
I don't see it as a mainstream feature. Maybe an option. Maybe useful for measuring things.
I *can* imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have portable enough 3d imagers and powerful enough phones to both stick the hardware in a phone-sized device and have a phone-sized device run the required software. I have no real understanding of how the physics of that would really work, granted, but it doesn't seem totally outside the bounds of possibility.
But that's just the input. I *can't* really imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have powerful enough *printers* to take the output of such a precise scanner, and recreate it anywhere near so precise, even if you're only talking about an object made entirely out of one or two kinds of plastic, which is unlikely to be the sort of object people would really want to "replicate". "Just about anything"? Yeah right.
Wake me up when we can replicate food, say, and have it taste the same as the original. Will we see that in my lifetime? Maybe, if I'm lucky. Will we see that in 3-5 years? I'd bet quite a lot of money on "no", and I'm not a betting sort of person.
Might be time for a remake of Weird Science.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Great, you can scan something and then print it in crappy plastic. Big whoop.
Seriously, 3D printing has been around for a while now, and I am still waiting to see anything beyond the Gee-Whiz level of cool or useful. You can only make so many money clips, pencil holders, and miniature busts before it becomes clear it is just a toy. Industrial ones that can print in metal are a different story, but the crappy plastic extruders are never going to take over the world or replace China's factories.
that the "accurate within microns" part is only applicable if you feed it some scaling information.
Otherwise, it's going to only be as accurate as the person guessing the size of the original.
AFAICT, the technique used by this imager is FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) which basically give you a very accurate time-of-flight measurement. In this type of system, the received optical frequency difference from the transmitted frequency is measured by optical-coherent mixing and sensing the resultant beat signal frequency. Apparently this groups contribution to this technique is to measure both the phase and amplitude of this beat signal digitally so multiple algorithms can be deployed to analyze the beat signal.
In any case, given a very accurate distance to an object, the solid angle projection to the imaged object, and some basic optical system calibration data, it is presumably fairly straightforward compute the actual size of the object w/o guessing.
Today, anyone with some determination and a few photographs can replicate keys. How soon will it be till the average criminal has access to an instant key duplicator? A high quality scanner could mark the end of even the top rated physical keys.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
Before we get too far with this thing, what has this guy predicted 5 years ago? How did that turn out? Without some calibration there is no reason to pay attention to his predictions more than the predictions of Satguru Somereallylongnameanandaswami.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact