MakerBot shows off its Digitizer 3D scanner

[Eddie]

MakerBot showed off it's new digitizer scanner today. It allows for you to scan in 3d objects and them print them out with a printer. I'm really excited for this! Check out the entire article at: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/20/47...d-scanner-demo

MakerBot's Digitizer is the kind of thing that sounds too good to be true: a desktop scanner that can build perfect 360-degree recreations of almost anything that can fit on its eight-inch-wide platform. After announcing the Digitizer early this year, MakerBot is now showing it off for the first time, albeit in a carefully supervised demo. And despite some obvious limitations, it seems to stack up quite well.
The core of the Digitizer is a camera and laser system that captures hundreds of lines around an object. Once you place something on the round platform, the machine starts one of two rotations that will create a series of points around it. Each rotation — one clockwise, one counter-clockwise — is comprised of 800 tiny ticks, as the camera essentially finds the edge of the object over and over. When it's done, MakerBot's companion software will lay a mesh over the whole thing, creating a 3D object that's ready to print. The whole process takes a little over ten minutes, a period that doesn't include the much longer printing time.

[4Unow]

WOW, this is amazing. I wonder how soon these will be made available by other companies, and I wonder if we will see an all-in-one printer/scanner come out soon.