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3D for the real world

matterport.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: 3D for the real world

#4
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?

Re: 3D for the real world

#6
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.

Re: 3D for the real world

#7
post #4

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?

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.

Re: 3D for the real world

#8
post #6

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.

Yes, and since everything is triangulated too early (it seems) there's no level-of-detail. The scan in the video looks like puke. The scan that plays in the background when you load the page first looks much better.

Re: 3D for the real world

#9
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.

Re: 3D for the real world

#10

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

If you have a kinect with a usb adapter you can try out microsoft's kinect sdk. There are a lot example apps including several 3d scanning ones (called kinectfusion I think?).
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