This week at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. there was a happy merging of hundreds of people in the 3D scanning world and museum world. We gathered to see presentations from so many experts in these fields, including folks from Autodesk, 3D Systems, the Smithsonian and many other museums. We learned about the Wright Flyer, ancient weapons, whale and dolphin fossils, a CT scan of an Embreea orchid and Eulaema bee, and a killer whale hat.
And you thought hand-soldering fifty kits’ worth of SMDs was hard…
Autodesk’s 123D Catch is great for making 3D scans from digital photos — miraculous, really — but it’s a cloud-based freebie that comes with constraints. You can upload only a limited number of photos, and your 3D mesh will come back at a maximum resolution that may not be all you desire. Here are three […]
The mainstream news media is awash with speculation that 3D printing is bringing about a second industrial revolution. Whether this is true or not, nowhere is the comparison more apt than with The Flexiscale Company, a small UK startup making 3D models of the great steam engines of the first industrial revolution. I caught up […]
Got a favorite desktop 3D printing or scanning appliance? We want to hear about it!
The principle behind this scanner is the typical of a line scanner. A laser beam intercepts the object to be measured and a camera, positioned at a known angle and distance shoots a series of images. With some trigonometry considerations and optic laws it is relatively easy to reconstruct the Zeta dimension, the measurement of the distance between the object and the camera.
The Photon, an affordable 3D scanner, has already quadrupled its $80,000 Indiegogo goal, with still two weeks to go. Almost as gratifying: the Photon has generated a flurry of proposed uses for the device beyond the original “maker hobbyist” market they were targeting. The Photon is the first product from Toronto-based company Matterform, founded by friends and collaborators Adam Branejs and Drew Cox.
