This is a pointer to a review from 2015 for a product that's no longer commercially available. Seems like perhaps the technology wasn't as mature or capable as the review seems to indicate, if it didn't make it.

Having owned and used the device I can attest to that. It was hard to get it to work reliably, and it certainly couldn't handle either small finely detailed items or bigger spaces like whole rooms.

It would do part of a room fine and then lose tracking and never be able to re-establish tracking and you would have to start all over again.

The V2 (Structure Core) has a built in IMU and is much better at keeping tracking. The quality of the USB link between the sensor and the computer also makes a big difference. (not an expert in this particular area) but iirc USB is like TCP in that if a packet is missing or corrupted it'll ask for it to be resent, it seems like the Structure sensors are quite sensitive to this and missing more then a few frames leads to alignment issues. That being said I wouldn't call the experience user friendly on any level, their software is really really bad too, I've had to write some tools to modify their save files so that I can rotate the reconstruction area because that's not a feature of the software. Definitely strongly dis-recommend buying one.

Mobiles have built in LiDAR and TOF now, not to mention it was possible to build 3d models with just a phone using photogrammetry. ARKit and ARCore have also come a long way to replacing things like this. It's just all built into phones now.

It's not that simple. Whatever you do will still need a good amount of cleaning up and post production work.

This [1] is a good survey of what's possible using iphone12's flash type lidar and if you check the author's Sketchfab work you can see the results.

[1] https://albn.medium.com/3d-scanning-with-the-iphone-lidar-8c...

This is based on structured/coded light and as such is basically useless for most surfaces that will not reflect light (think most black things) or very reflective things (think metal). I have an SR300 which was intended for face scans and it works very nicely for humans but I tried to scan other surfaces for a school project[1] and the limitations became obvious very fast.

[1] https://github.com/Belval/Scanner3D

Cubify was a rebranded Structure Sensor, which was a Primesense camera, which was the original Kinect (that Apple bought in 2013.)

It used structured light: project a static pattern of infrared dots and then measure parallax using an infrared camera a couple inches from the projector to calculate depth. It worked well, but can't be miniaturized as it relies on a large offset between projector and camera. Orbbec make similar cameras today, e.g. https://orbbec3d.com/product-astra-pro

Modern depth cameras, like the LiDAR Scanner in iPhones and iPads, use a different technique: time-of-flight (ToF), which shoots laser pulses and measures the time taken to reflect back to infer depth. Apple leads the field here, because they're the first to integrate a "direct" ToF sensor into mobile devices, which has a number of advantages over the "continuous wave" ToF found in Android phones.

Do you know if purely vision based techniques have any advantages for inferring depth in these scenarios (close range object scanning) over lidars?

Yes, different failure cases (purely vision can't tell the depth of a plain white wall) but there are orders of magnitude more pixels in regular cameras. Apple's LiDAR produces a 256x192 depth map, but its RGB cameras run at 1920x1440. You get much more detail, but passive stereo is orders of magnitude slower (ToF sensors are 60 Hz, photogrammetry takes minutes.)

They complement each other well, which is the basis of our approach at Abound: combine the detail of multi-view stereo for short-range with the robustness of ToF out to 5m.

These scans don't look any higher quality than what you can get with FaceId or lidar on the iPad Pro. It's a product from 2015 so I guess it could have made sense back then.

Every once in a while I start looking for a great affordable 3d scanner. Is there something like the equivalent of the prusa 3d printer for 3d scanning?

Good question. There are several 3D scanners in that price range, but I'm curious as to the difference between photogrammetry with a phone, something like the $800 SOL 3D, and the $10k+ handheld options.

The ~$1k 3D scanners out there advertise an accuracy of something like "up to 0.1mm," which puts them in the ballpark of the resolution a basic Prusa's likely to be able to reproduce, but I'm really unclear on how true that is in practice.

There's likely some actual Nyquist-Shannon ish corollary that will tell you how much higher your scanning res has to be than your printing res, but 2x is probably a safe bet. Not to mention "accuracy" tells an imprecise story. Does it mean that the best case scenario every point is at most 0.1mm from where it should be? That doesn't mean the same thing as "accurately resolves features larger than 0.1mm³".

No because 3D scanning is really, really hard. Much much more complex than 3d printing. There's no fool-proof way of determining the position and normal of a surface point other than to touch it. All EM based techniques must contend with the wide gamut of different interactions common materials will have with a given wavelength. Not to mention occlusion.

Any iPhone with FaceID is actually a very capable as a 3D scanner. I recommend heges, it has support for Lidar scanning as well (if you have an iPhone 12 Pro or a new iPad Pro).

https://hege.sh/

This could be a big deal for games Games Workshop and Warhammer like games in general. I don't think this could copy model because they are so small and detailed but the technology is advancing quickly! Why bother buying the models when I can 3d print them OR port the 3d file into TTS and play online?

I wish I had a system like this when I was a kid, and spent a the equivalent of a few hundred euros over the course of a few years to buy just a few of these miniatures. These prices were simply outrageous, especially outside the UK.

Because buying the models even at GW prices is likely cheaper than the time and effort necessary to do a good job of printing them. Model piracy does occur but it takes the from of Chinese recasters making molds directly from the model sprues. That all being said there is a market for this and my guess is the BOM cost of the hardware necessary to make a 3D scanner capable of resolving the detail of a tabletop mini is in the $10-$30 range right now. No way there's enough market to foot the bill of SW dev tho.

Yeah with the current tech it isn't really worth it to print stuff unless its like an entire army and you would be ok not using GW models. However, in the future I'm betting this will change and It will be much cheaper to print the models at home or have someone you know do it!

You can search for 3D scan in your app store for current products and then try it.