With the commercial benefits mostly in accuracy in the room, we in 3D printing may find ourselves the ignored Cinderella. With the call of the virtual and apps so strong, the main attraction by Apple would seem to be in the room, not necessarily huge accuracy on softball-sized objects.
It’s unclear if we can extract a point cloud and it’s not yet known how repairing this point cloud would work.įor Apple right now, super accurate measurement and scanning of rooms will open up an entire AR world, as well as a lot of possibilities in apps, such as: try new paint colors, calculate how much wallpaper you need, fit your new kitchen, 3D scan and eBay your objects, calculate your move, sing along with Frank Sinatra, place yourself in a movie scene, 3D emojis etc. The number of points are probably not going to be numerous enough. Meanwhile, the kind of detail level that you would need for 3D printing could just not be in the offing. Virtual trying on clothes could be huge as well, since online buyers return around 40% of clothing bought on the web.
At home, just the ability to see how big the TV you found online is or to virtually see how your new standing desk will fit into your house could be very impactful for eCommerce. It features a time-of-flight scanner that can accurately measure distances and capture scenes in a five-meter range.įor Apple of course being able to move realistically in game environments and do things such as virtually try out products will be significant. Apple seems to want to deploy it to really bring AR objects into our living rooms or to enable room-sized scanning applications. LiDAR is a 3D scanning technology most often used for building-sized or room-sized objects.
Meanwhile, on the other face of the Apple Pro models, you get three cameras (main, wide, and telephoto), as well as LiDAR. In 2017, this was a structured light scanner using an IR projector. The TrueDepth camera enables facial recognition. The chip also has 30% more graphics performance and faster image processing that will be very handy for scanning applications. On the hardware front, the A14 chip’s Neural Engine will enable machine learning applications.
Software support for STL and things like object recognition through 3D scanning could be impactful also. Apple’s new iPhones support a number of scanning features that could evolve to be highly impactful for us. This time, it’s finally going to happen…again. The good news is that 3D scanning on phones is here… sort of. Phone-based 3D scanning would be just about the best and biggest thing that could ever happen to our industry out beyond our own efforts to improve ourselves. Mass customization would be an everywhere-available, idle pass time technology subject to near-instant gratification, if 3D scanning would be available on all phones. If your phone is a good 3D scanner, then you could scan yourself and get unique gloves 3D printed, or a golf club, or a headrest for your car. It requires effort to go to a store and get 3D scanned. If we look at mass customization, as well, it is being held back currently.
For everyone to get involved in 3D printing they would need a Twitter-simple way to input their designs and ideas. It would in effect bring the power of software to bear on our problem that no one can 3D model anything. What’s more, a native 3D scanning ability could let us sculpt objects in thin air or customize objects through simple apps. With billions of devices worldwide, 3D scanning on smartphones could make 3D scanning a technology that many people use day to day. Imminent investments and releases turned out to take years to complete. Late nights in bars and hushed hallway whispers mentioned huge amounts of sensors being bought and work in file fixing software. Reality is often a bit more like trickling molasses than dreamt lightning advances, however. But, as the PrimeSense acquisition was much talked about in 2013, the LinX acquisition fueled a lot of speculation in 2015, the TrueDepth camera was going to change everything in 2017, and ARKit has always been exciting for us since things like object recognition and image reconstruction would also benefit 3D printing. Apple’s acquisition of several 3D scanning companies and Google’s Project Tango fueled endless discussions. For years people have been speculating when or if 3D scanning will come to mobile phones.