A new kickstarter project that may help get some good real world 3D models

3D Printing
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1

A new kickstarter project that may help get some good real world 3D models scanned in to the various pre-printing formats:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/occipital/structure-sensor-capture-the-world-in-3d

2

This project looks primarily focused on the hardware, making it easier for software developers to bring scan results in to their software. I am hoping that the Demo Software, object scanner and room capture, will be able to export .stl, .obj, and .ply. They didn’t say. If not - we’d have to wait for someone else to develop the GUI interface for 3D printing. Maybe the folks at http://matterform.net can port their software to make use of this device.

3

They are using a board-level camera made by PrimeSense. Spec should be similar to the current Kinect.

4

Is that basically good or bad. I haven’t tried the Kinnect, but I understand that it isn’t very well suited for details. But then, there were comments about which of the two versions were being used as well, the xbox or the win8 version of the hardware (or perhaps it was the associated software being the actual culprit - idk).

5

From what I’ve seen, the Kinect has very low resolution when scanning… presumably after some sort of smoothing algorithm to eliminate noise. I love how they want to scan in “every dimension”.

6

The kickstarter page lacks any real samples, and in all the videos you only get to see the scanned 3d models for a few seconds. From the little they do show, it looks on par to what you can get from a kinect. Overall shape, but lacking any small details.

We’ll have to wait for some downloadable samples.

7

It’s a money grab gimmic… And good on them!

8

Yes, that looks quite likely.

9

kickstart sounds great in principal, my sister has found it to be impossible.She has a wonderful business idea and the research to prove it.Kickstart would not even talk to her saying they have NO interest in medical devices. So what is it for if not to help people create business that create jobs?

10

Kickstarter exists to make Kickstarter money. They don’t deal with medical because there are so many legal and legislation issues involved, it’s not profitable.

11

There is also IndieGoGo.com - but she may run in to the same issue for reasons stated previously.

12

Thanks for the advice. She has a working model and is currently trying to scrape up the money for her provisional patent. I am sad to see her struggle to get even $500 in funding for that. I understand that medical devices have some risk but if the idea is solid the reward is tremendous. I hate to think she may have to give up. At this time she is working three jobs and is one semester from her masters at NYU. She is not able to keep food on her table much less afford to fund this project alone. I will forward your excellent input to her and i pray she is able to achieve her goals.Thanks again Dee Myers