

MIT develops a portable, high-resolution 3D imaging solution - dmcgregor
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/08/09/mit-develops-a-portable-high-resolution-3d-imaging-solution/

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huhtenberg
I wish HN had a "wow" button. Simply upvoting a submission like this one
seems... inadequate.

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Cushman
Context: _GelSight can register “physical features less than a micrometer in
depth and about two micrometers across,” which means it can create a 3D image
of ink on a piece of paper (below):_

Below that there is a 3D image of ink on a piece of paper. Taken with a
handheld device. "Wow" about covers it, although I might go with "WOW."

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Jach
So has everyone else, apparently. (I'm at Siggraph. (Off topic, I also learned
I can't really see glasses-free 3D, but I'm not stereo blind. One eye may be
slightly more dominant, so it could be an issue of 'calibration' I suppose.))

MIT's is definitely the coolest and best I've seen though, I don't think I've
seen anything like it. Everyone else's is a light-based scanner or algorithms
to 3D-ify mostly flat imaging. This amazes me beyond no end.

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asifjamil
_"When the metallic side is pressed against the surface of an object, the
rubber deforms slightly"_

while the concept is great, it still doesn't maximize precision (for high
resolution analysis), since the pressure can also deform your object of
interest. ideally, you would want to use a metallic as less viscous as
possible to keep the surfaces rigid.

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pontifier
This is truly remarkable. I woke up in the middle of the night after reading
this with a few improvements that can turn this into a human-equivalent level
skin sensor for robotics.

Temperature: add something that changes color based on temperature.

Wetness: add some microchannels and watch them as they wick moisture into the
material

Pain: introduce small ink packages that will burst if the material is damaged.

Vibration: add a microphone to detect pressure changes in the touched object,
or if your cameras are fast enough just watch the surface as it moves up and
down.

This could also be simply expanded to senses we don't have: Magnetism (ferrous
particles), radiation(scintillation), PH level(litmus), detecting the presence
of any chemical directly(specialised receptor), etc... this is revolutionary.

Using cameras behind a gel is a simple, non-obvious(to me), solution to the
contact sensing problem. This is going to be used everywhere.

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Gianteye
I wonder how easy a cheap, low tech version of this would be to make. A camera
staring at the underside of a clear gel with an incredibly thin layer of
opaque reflective pigment on top of it could pick up and translate a depth map
if the surface were evenly lit.

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extension
The computer vision part might be related to polynomial texture mapping:
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/>

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tocomment
I don't understand how this works. Little help hn!

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neves
Inside sources say that it will be called Nitendo 3DS

