Personalize: The race to bring digital scanning to the home is well and truly on; MakerBot announced their Digitizer at SXSWI last month, Moedls launched their scanning with your smartphone on Kickstarter, CADScan achieved full funding on Kickstarter last month, and Microsoft have opened up the Kinect for cheap 3D scanning. The latest to join the sprint is the rather nifty looking Photon 3D Scanner, fully funded on Indiegogo with 27 days still remaining.
5 comments:
I like the sleek and compact nature of the design they've created and I think it's great for the DIY community (that price isn't terrible either). Personally I wish that the images it scans could also be converted to 3D solids as well as meshes, but maybe that'll give me a reason to finally learn how exactly to work with them in AutoCAD. maybe I can do the conversion myself. The real difference there is which type of item will use less memory in the program.....all in all thought I'm pretty on board. I think that having a scanner as well as a printer in a shop can have a benefit especially if you do any sort of prototyping. Especially with mechanical design, connection design and other a-typical solutions you may decide to pursue and this can replace full fabrication early in the process. Right now I think the NexEngine scanner is at the top of my list (although I'm not entirely sold on their software, and the price is pretty high), but I'm interested to see how the MakerBot scanner will compare to the Photon...the price should be similar and I think it's really gonna come down to the overall design, function, scanner envelope and accuracy.
I love this kind of machinery. And I want one. I hear SoD is buying a 3d scanner next year...I hope I get to use it. I am very familiar with 3d printing, but 3d scanning is just as cool. It will allow people in theatre to make exact replicas of certain objects, but out of a safer material. I am very excited to use them!
3D scanners are a really cool and useful tool to have around. My high school had a 3D printer and 3D scaner that I was able to use. Many of the things that a 3D printer can make are built to work with things in the real world and it's important to be able to scan these real world objects in to the computer so as to build the parts that will be printed to work together. In the world of theatre I can see 3D scanners being used to take paper set models in to a digital space as well as to scan objects to be edited and printed out for props making. I'm really glad to hear that CMU Drama has just bought a new 3D printer and 3D scanner. I don't know what model we are getting, but maybe it's the Photon 3D.
3D scanners are really the perfect companion to 3D printers. Unless you are incredibly skilled at 3D modeling on the computer some real world objects are incredibly difficult to replicate so having a 3D scanner would make replicating objects much easier. Like in the video in the article someone modeled something out of clay and then 3D scanned it in to the printing software.
With every release of some new gadget in the 3D scanning/printing race, I become less interested. What does interest me though is the manner in which a lot of this frenzied pace of development is being funded. Grassroots entrepreneurial sites like kickstarter, indiegogo, fundmyproject.com and
gofundme.com are changing the way we think about the future of technology. No longer do we expect the next big breakthrough to emerge from behind the last in a series of time-code locked doors like something out of the opening credits of "Get Smart." Corporate players like Microsoft and Autodesk are an afterthought here, the Sancho Panzas of this new landscape, trotting along behind the visionaries leading the charge. No doubt many of those visionaries are just that, and the giant possibilities they see so clearly now may blow away by next month.
But to my point: Why not fund art this way? Of course there are already a handful of sites that provide a platform for artists as well as entrepreneurs to petition the public for project funding, and certainly some of it is successful. The problem I have as a potential funder is in promising support to an artist whose work I have never seen and may never get to see (if their in New York for example, and I'm in Winnemucca). The difference with funding a 3D scanner is that every funder can have the hope, however misguided, eventually to purchase the product of their generosity (and insight) off the shelf. It seems to me not unlike how a subscription to regional theatre used to work (and still does, although less and less). A subscription to your local theatre is kind of a promise of hope for the coming season. I think a lot of people, in my generation especially, with our short attention spans and lack of brand loyalty, are nervous about making such a big promise (just check out the 20% marriage rate decline since 1960!). And, in truth, I'm not sure we can blame them for being skeptical. In my experience anyway, it would be a small miracle if a theatre's entire season was worth seeing. It may be instructive at some point for producers of theatre and other art to look at the revolution in online funding schemes and imagine something like a subscriber base that can choose to support a specific show or project based on their interests, backed by the reputation of the theatre, rather than funding the theatre as a whole. For instance, I might be interested in funding a staged version of the aforementioned "Get Smart" done in the style of Kathakali, while not so interested in this years re-hashing of "A Christmas Carol." Return funders would be base future support on the merit of past performance, and there could be a more direct and perhaps even more lucrative feedback loop of funding and production than the perhaps now dated philosophy behind subscription.
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