

3D for the real world - waterlooalex
http://matterport.com/

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31reasons
It doesn't look ready for consumers. The scans looks like lumps of clay.
Shouldn't it look exactly like the spaces it scans ? Thats what scanners do.
When I scan a document, it gives me pretty sharp copy. I wouldn't pay for
scanner that give me very fuzzy copy of a document, at least i would not try
to sell it until i perfect it.

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sourkremlin
When you scan a document, it produces a two-dimensional image. This is
producing a traversable three dimensional space. It's a very different problem
for so many reasons, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same
fidelity in the result in the near future.

~~~
31reasons
As a consumer I don't care how difficult it is for you to implement it. Its
the harsh reality of the consumer market.

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philmcc
I am a little taken aback by their pricing strategy, or maybe I'm
misunderstanding it.

If you purchase this, you have to pay (at least) $500 a year, for hosting, and
$20 per scan, if you scan more than (say) 6 times in a month?

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cleversoap
I too was confused but then I realised this isn't meant for fun hacky
3D-mapping. It's meant to sell stuff for the home and I think that's
unfortunately going to limit the reach of this technology. The only third
party type of business that might be able to make use of this is a real estate
company for obvious reasons. I guess they have a public API that can pull the
data but even then that requires somebody with the camera to upload your
house.

I highly doubt IKEA or any other furniture store is going to bring their
camera out to me just so I can then digitally place a few sofas and I'm not
going to pay $500 just to... what... save me a trip to the returns department?
If I bought it what happens when I'm done decorating? Does my camera become a
useless $500 paperweight?

It's cool that they allow you to have an OBJ (UV maps and textures too?) - I
assume that doesn't include whatever proprietary meta-data gets attached to
denote walls, floors, et al. If I could get the mesh with just the camera I
would buy one of these in a heartbeat but otherwise I don't see this being
used by any consumer apart from the absurdly obsessive renovator.

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philmcc
Right? Except it's not a $500 paperweight. It's a $4,500 paperweight with an
additional $500 a year overhead.

Depending on how effective Project Tango is, this technology might be short
lived. Maybe there's some manual labor that has to happen on _their_ end
before your files are ready? Otherwise I just don't understand the cost.
Storage and bandwidth couldn't possibly cost $50/mo.

Sometimes I really do lament the fact that everyone decided that an ongoing
subscription model is the way to go for everything.

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flog
I'm surprised there hasn't been more improvement in the scans - I would think
given the restricted domain of interiors it'd be possible to straighten out
edges and things.

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sourkremlin
Yes. The thing that sticks out the most to me is the poor treatment of edges.
One possible reason the edges look bad is that meshing algorithms that take
into account sharp edges can produce unrealistic mesh topologies that are
difficult to work with. Bad mesh topologies can wreak havoc on some operations
like texture mapping, which they obviously use quite heavily. There are
algorithms that can clean this up, but it is a messy and computationally
intensive business.

Or it could just be poor data from the scanner -- that would be unfortunate.
Some of the artifacts are so bad that it would seem to suggest that this is
the case (the corner of the countertop in the kitchen is quite bad, or the
protrusion in the wall above the entry-way into the kitchen, for some
examples). It's hard to tell from looking at the processed result. I wonder
what the raw scans look like.

Very cool product though, even if it's rough right now. I can see this looking
nice in the future.

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nickthemagicman
This is so cool. I want to be able to build clay sculptures and convert them
to blender or CAD files then rig/animate them.

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letstryagain
Can anyone recommend some open source code to experiment with at home? Maybe
fed by Google Tango or Microsoft Kinect?

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Svenstaro
[http://pointclouds.org/](http://pointclouds.org/) has a subproject called
([http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/using_kinfu_l...](http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/using_kinfu_large_scale.php))
that you can feed with a kinect or a similar device. It's quite fun!

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waterlooalex
I want this + something to preview paint, furniture and renovation changes to
my home!

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stuaxo
This is cool, I note the video is part of the trend for voices to sound more
robotic.

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sonnyhe2002
This is like Paracosm.io

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msie
Camera looks like three Kinect sensors.

