You want to transform your smartphone into a 3D scanner? Just use this amazing app developped by scientists from the Computer Vision and Geometry Lab of ETH Zurich and your ordinary smartphone will become a mobile 3D scanner.
3D scanning aims to capture the geometry of the 3D world. However, most existing solutions require a complicated setup, are often hard to use and might not always work outdoors. Marc Pollefeys, professor at the Institute for Visual Computing and his group found a way to develop a software that works with existing smartphone technology that allows the user to scan a 3D model almost as easy as taking a photograph. The technology was demonstrated publicly for the first time on the 4th of December 2013 at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Sydney, Australia.
Instead of taking a normal photograph, a user simply moves the phone around the object of interest and after a few motions, a 3D model appears on the screen. As the user keeps moving, additional images are recorded automatically and used to extend the 3D model. As all calculations are performed directly on the phone, the user gets immediate feedback and can select additional viewpoints to cover missing parts of the 3D model. This is an important advantage compared to solutions that batch process all the images in the cloud at a later time. [ETHZ]
