Startup Wants You to Capture the World in 3-D
Gur Bittan envisions a future where you’re not just capturing a regular video of a child’s first steps with a smartphone; you’re doing it in 3-D, and sharing it with friends who can manipulate the video to watch it from different perspectives—even the kid’s point of view, providing you’ve scanned the scene from enough angles.
The company’s software and hardware designs are part of Google’s Project Tango tablet, which can map environments and objects. It is also working on apocket-sized 3-D scanner and already offers an enterprise 3-D scanner called the F5.
To capture 3-D information, a projector overlays an infrared light pattern onto whatever it is you’re trying to scan—a teddy bear, for instance. Then a digital camera and a depth sensor, synched to the projector, capture the scene with the light reflected by the bear. The technology works even in complete darkness, since it includes its own illumination; in bright environments the quality of the resulting image depends on the hardware used.