Microsoft Develops App That Turns Any Smartphone Into a Comprehensive 3D Scanner

With the respective app, which has been developed by a bunch of scientists, iPhone and Android users will be able to create high-quality 3D images of objects in real-time in no time, just like you would take a normal photo. The phone tracks the object that’s being captured and then builds up a model as the camera captures it from different angles.

Microsoft began promoting the use of 3D depth cameras with its PCs through its Windows Hello login process, which uses an embedded RealSense 3D camera from Intel to recognize a user’s face.

AutoDesk’s 123DCapture app allows you to create your own 3D scans.

The researchers call this system MobileFusion and say that it’s better than other methods for 3D scanning primarily because it doesn’t require any other hardware or even an internet connection for that matter.

Peter Ondruska, a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford, worked on the project while he was an intern at Microsoft Research. Microsoft Research used an iPhone 5S to scan and make 3D models of things like a teddy bear.

The practice of 3D printing may soon be a lot simpler.

For those excited about the increasingly close frontier of augmented reality, the applications of an easily accessible 3D scanner like MobileFusions are exciting to say the least. MobileFusion will be shown off at the worldwide Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in early October.

The way the app works is that it uses a sophisticated algorithm which uses a smartphone’s camera in order to take multiple images in a similar fashion as to how the human eye functions.

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Microsoft’s researchers are working to get MobileFusion available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices. Unfortunately, MobileFusion isn’t available to the public just yet, nor are their firm plans in place to make it available in the near future. “We believe these types of 3D scanning technologies, will bring 3D acquisition to a new audience, where lightweight capture of the real-world becomes truly ubiquitous”.