We usually make incremental continual improvements to Shapeways. Mesh Medic represents something much more revolutionary. Mesh Medic is an automated 3D printing file repair system that will deal with many issues people have when trying to design for 3D printing. From now on when you upload files to Shapeways Mesh Medic will be there to help you. He will repair holes, invert your inverted normals so they're normal, repair manifolds and generally make life a lot easier for you. 

While Mesh Medic will not work for everyone and not work all the time, this is the most significant improvement to Shapeways so far. Please tell us what you think give us feedback on how to improve Mesh Medic on the Forum. It has never been easier for a designer to take a design that is your head and get it made into a physical object than today and every day after today.  You can try Mesh Medic out right now by uploading your STL, x3D or Collada file here.

For Rhino users it will take away an extra step in checking and converting their models and everyone else shouldbenefit significantly also by having their workflow from file to 3D printed item reduced. Please do always check the uploaded model in the 3D view on Shapeways to make sure that the automatic repair filters didn't repair something they should not have. Mesh Medic currently does work for VRML files but not for the color VRML files with textures and we will enable this as soon as we can. 

So lets say you're on the move and get a tweet from a friend that they've just added something to Thingyverse. Or someone tells you that this one spur gear right for your project can be downloaded from the Shapeways 3D parts database, only you're walking around. What do you do? Well from now on you can download the Netfabb STL viewer on your Iphone. It is free. You can point it at a URL and it will download the STL and let you see it while you are out and about. Using the Iphone's touch pad you can spin and rotate your models while looking at them from all sides. You can pinch to zoom in and I think its generally more intuitive to use than a PC STL viewer. Check out the video of this fun free tool below or download it on the App Store. 

Bruce Sterling is a noted sci fi author, futurologist & speaker. As well as being an award winning author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement he is an early and constant booster of Augmented Reality technology and coined the word Spime. Spimes are pieces of technology that know where they are and can reveal their entire history to you. He is also behind a project that hopes to document dead media, founded a green design movement, loves Bollywood movies, is a hacker in the original sense and you really should read his Wired blog Beyond the Beyond.      

Joris Peels: I was wondering if at one point you would be interested in doing an interview about 3D printing/the future?

Bruce Sterling: Well, man, all I can tell you is that I'm hanging out at a monster science event with labs-on-a-chip and 3d biofactories.

This video is awesome. You can make your own bioplastic. Starch, glycerine, vinegar and water. 7 parts water, 1 vinegar, .5 glycerine and 1.5 parts starch. You heat the mixture up while stirring. You can then flatten it and it will turn into a sheet of bioplastic. You can even add your own colors to it. The sheet can then be laser cut. You can make plastic and then laser cut it. Wow? I've been watching this video for 20 minutes now over and over again. Guess what I'll be doing this weekend? More than a little fascinated. Thank you Lasern!

Shapeways Community Member Andrew Plumb is also known as Clothbot. He is doing some pretty amazing things with wearable electronics, integrating fabrics and robotics, with his Makerbot and on Shapeways. You can check out his site here or follow him on twitter here.

Joris Peels: What is a clothbot?

Andrew Plumb: Short answer: A cyborg teddy bear! (Cue the Akira nightmares.) Longer answer: A robot needs to play well with its surroundings.  In a household or office space that means bumping into things and people, surviving frequent encounters with fluidic space, etc.  The real world is messy.  I could spend my time waterproofing a standard tin-can robot, hammering out dents, adding proximity sensors and patching holes in the walls, or I could take a different approach.  Clothbot is about robotic or cybernetic elements integrated comfortably into our surroundings and on our person. Making conventional printed circuit boards (PCB) is messy, requires toxic materials to fabricate, and the end product is quite rigid. When your "board" is a piece of cloth and electrical conductor is thread, you don't even need molten solder to connect elements into a useful piece of active circuitry.  Power up the computerized embroidery machine (I don't have one yet) and you have a tool to build flexible, multilayered designs in no time!

Joris Peels: Tell us about your wearable disk buttons design.

Andrew Plumb: In the beginning, Bre Pettis needed a button so he makerbotted one. I asked myself, how do you make a great idea like Makerbot-printable clothing buttons better?  Why, make them Lego Compatible!  To encourage others to explore the mashup potential I made the design source available under a simple Creative Commons - By license.

Now, a Makerbot is great for printing out fabricated objects (I call them fabjects) near the size of a cupcake, hence the product name Cupcake CNC.  However, as the design dimensions approach the 0.5mm diameter aperture of the extruder nozzle, the resulting fabjects get rough.  My MakerBot prototype gave me enough confidence in the soundness of my basic design to place that first order with Shapeways.

Getting back to the clothbot idea, I could have used press-fasteners to add, remove and reposition parts but they tend to be bulky and short each other out if you don't back them with something more rigid.  I could have used more conventional PCB sockets, which would work but would look out-of-place in every-day wear.  Turning a button into a socket or touch-sensor hides the function until it's needed pretty well and allows for more whimsy in the design without resorting to spinning bow ties.

Joris Peels: Tell us about your soft circuits.    

Andrew Plumb: I've dabbled with soft circuits (like those Mouna's electroniccrafts.org page) on and off for years but it's only in the last year that I've really focused on pulling it all together.  Ideas are easy; implementation takes discipline.      

Joris Peels: Why are you so fascinated by organic things & technology?  

Andrew Plumb: On one hand, technology is what I do for work and play. I'm an electrical engineer by trade, helping my co-workers design integrated circuits (ICs).  On the other hand, natural organisms adapt to their surroundings by way of simple pressures of competition, cooperation and environment.  Organic technologies are those that integrate well into our tech-augmented lives.  Sharp edges are confrontational; edgeless surfaces rock and roll with the flow.  Sometimes you need confrontation - try trimming your nails without sharp edges - but for the most part you want comfort at your finger-tips and on your person.      

You've been involved with wearables for a long time...whats a wearable?  

To me, wearables computing, electronics, mechatronics are about mind- and body-enhancing technologies that meet us half-way between automating our tedious routines and amplifying our life experiences.  It's a bit of a paradox really, a blend of those technologies that disappear into the background (taking pictures, recording sounds for future review, GPS coordinates, simple biometrics) and those that immerse you in a fully augmented reality (hands-free headsets, head-mount optics filtering and amplifying your vision, reactive clothing, exoskeletal robotics, real-time translation).  Striking the right balance at the right time is a challenge.      

What is the dream of wearables?  

I'm not sure...  I've amassed quite a collection of head-mount displays, data gloves, embedded computers and chording keyboards over the years chasing dreams, but I have integrated very few of them into my every-day activities.  I don't like being anchored to a desk, but there are times when I find myself spread across two or three monitors deeply immersed in data for hours.  The simple augmented reality apps that are starting to appear on iPhone and similar platforms offer hints at what's possible, but it still feels like peaking through keyholes. Virtual Reality (VR) systems from fifteen years ago felt more immersive because your hands were free and head directly tracked.  Over the years I've drifted to a more general pervasive, ambient computing approach.  ...Ask me again in another five years. :-)      

How do you like your Makerbot?  

Loving it!  I had been tracking Fab@Home and RepRap projects for a while but the barriers to entry (sourcing materials, tools and availability of my time) were such that I didn't jump into them right from the start.  When MakerBot Industries appeared with all the pieces in a convenient kit form, I pounced and landed up with MakerBot Number Nine (see http://clothbot.com/wiki/MakerBotNumberNine) from the first batch.  It's been particularly fun being involved in bootstrapping the community from the beginning. As each new batch has come online the former-newbies have been pitching in answers to the more common FAQs and taking on wiki editing roles, leaving those of us early-batchers with more time to take deep dives into the larger set of reprap development activities.  In the larger ecosystem of rapid prototyping technologies, I think of my Cupcake as a "bone maker".  It's great for prototyping ideas and making the scaffolding around which to wrap skins with more finish. Being able to take a design from drawing to prototype in less than a day is awesome!  When the raw material costs are so low though, being able to tweak and reprint a design ad infinitum can be a bit of a curse.  It takes time to learn when good is good enough.  Using Shapeways has helped impose some discipline on my own design process.      

What is Shapeways doing right? What are we doing wrong?  

The Right? Simply put, the breadth of fabrication technologies you carry.  You provide us individuals with access to manufacturing processes normally reserved for large institutions and people with deep pockets.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how my first stainless steel extruder nozzle experiment turns out!  The Wrong/Needs Improvement?  Just the usual list of technical gripes: - I can't preview my store front and individual items as a visitor (anonymous or logged in) would see it.  - Get licensing hooks (CC, GPL, etc) in place; I know you're working on it.  - I haven't quite figured out how the star rating is supposed to work from the seller's side. For example, one of my Clover Connectors  has been rated 3/5 but I haven't even received my own sample print to check against.  Are they rating the design based on the rendering or because they got their fabricated version faster than mine?

Do you know of a recyclable 3D printing material?

The only recyclable 3D printing materials I know of are in the abstract sense.  As long as the printing process is reversible, it should be easy to recycle.   For example, wax can be re-melted, glass can be ground up and re-fused, some metal alloys (e.g. electrical solder) can be reclaimed and reused. Even ABS could be melted and extruded back into RepRap/Makerbot compatible filament. The developments made by the Open3DP project are particularly fascinating to follow.

Sean Dabbs has come up with some fun Shapeways Co-Creators. "You as a Gnome" turns you into a gnome. You upload photographs of yourself or a loved one and these will be sculpted into a gnome by Sean. The 25 cm gnome starts at $209. The picture below is of a hand painted gnome and this would be more expensive.

You can also choose to be turned into an action figure. Upload pictures of your face, select your body type, choose the clothes you want to wear and Sean will turn you into an action figure!!

 

Dutch creative agency KesselsKramer has used 3D printing & stop motion to create an opening an closing sequence for Dutch children's TV show Het Klokhuis. The apples used for the stop motion sequence were 3D printed by Shapeways. The apples were made using our White, Strong & Flexible material and were so happy to have played a small part in this great video! The video is directed by John Kelly and you can read more about the people that made the video here.  Check out the videos below.

"Het Klokhuis" Opening titles from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

"Het Klokhuis" End titles from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Shapeways interviews Bre Pettis (on the right), the Maker in Chief over at Makerbot Industries. Makerbot Industries makes an affordable desktop 3D printer and we and a lot of other people are very excited about them and their Cupcake CNC. We asked Bre about the future of Makerbot Industries and desktop 3D printing.

Joris Peels: What's a Makerbot?

Bre Pettis: A MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer.

Joris Peels: And a Cupcake is a Makerbot?

Bre Pettis: Yes, the Cupcake is our flagship personal fabrication device! It makes things that are a little bigger than a cupcake!

Joris Peels: Who is the team behind Makerbot Industries?

Bre Pettis: Adam (Adam Mayer) has his head in the software, Zach has his hands on production, I'm making waves and we all start prototyping at 6pm when we stop answering emails, packing boxes and taking care of business.

What was the first thing you 3D printed?

A shot glass. Promptly filled with a deadly Scandinavian concoction. 

Your favorite thing so far?

Everyday I wake up and check out what's new on Thingiverse and I'm never let down. Lately there has been a trend to make tools to do other things with a MakerBot like the MicroLathe. When folks are using the tools we design to make other tools to make other things it gets me excited. We make things that make things that people use to make things that make other things that make things. Try saying that 3 times fast.
 
Who came up with the idea for Makerbot Industries?

Zach (Smith aka Hoeken) had been obsessed with 3D printing for a while and infected us with the personal manufacturing bug. Making things that make things is fun so it's contagious.
 
How long did it take you guys to get the company going, to get the first bots out the door?

We started on Jan 17. Had the prototype done by Mar 17, and then had the first batch of MakerBots out the door on April 17th. There wasn't a lot of sleep in those months. We actually ate 2 cases of ramen in those months so we wouldn't have to go out and eat. That was a bad idea. Don't do that, it's not healthy.
 
What are the differences between a Cupcake and a RepRap (Open source 3D printer project)?

The main difference between a MakerBot Cupcake CNC and a Reprap is how much time it takes to make one. The Reprap project is an academic research project and it can take a few months to gather the materials and then put a reprap together and then a lot of experimentation to get it to print. The MakerBot CupCake CNC is a kit and can be printing things out after a weekend of assembly with a friend.

Are you really going to try to tackle 3D scanning too?

Yes. Having a MakerBot 3D printer and MakerBot scanner is the washer/dryer combo of replication. Who doesn't want to print out portrait sculptures of their family and friends?
 
And what new materials will you introduce?

We just launched PLA, PolyLactic Acid, and it's flying off the shelves. It's clear and it's made from corn. It smells a bit like butter when you print with it. We're finishing up prototypes of the frostruder which is a syringe based extruder that can print with frosting and anything squishable like UV curable silicon. And clay! We're in the market for a kiln so we can fire our own MakerBotted tea set.
 
What is a typical Makerbot customer like?

A lot of our customers are time traveling antique hunters which brings up all sorts of shipping problems. Most people think that all MakerBot customers are seriously geeky, but the truth is that even though lots of designers and architects and engineers buy them, most of our customers are just clever people who are sick of waiting on other people for their jetpack.
 
Will everyone have a desktop 3D printer? If so when?

When the Altair came out, people criticized it and said there wasn't a need for more than 10 computers in the world. We're in that same kind of place with personal manufacturing that personal computing was back then. MakerBots will be an absolutely totally common thing to see on a desktop within 10 years.

Why is Thingiverse important?

We built Thingiverse because we needed a place to share our designs so we wouldn't lose them and so our friends could make what we had made and then modify those designs and make them better. The community is amazing and supportive, and it's also a lot of fun. There is no other place that you can share a design for a physical thing and people around the world will make their own copies within minutes (NB: mmm we might need to do some more work in promoting our 3D parts database). It's that kind of sharing magic that makes Thingiverse the closest thing to teleportation that we've got in this solar system.
 
What are the mayor challenges for you guys?

It can be hard to find time to eat and sleep. There is way too much stuff to do in this world right now. If you're bored in this day and age, you're doing it wrong. Turn off the TV, pick a ambition and start spending your free time working on it. Besides 3d printing, there are all sorts of open source collaborative hardware projects to work on.

A while back you had an experiment in crowd sourced manufacturing with having people produce parts for Makerbots for you. How did that work out? Will you be doing this more often?

We were the first company to ever do crowd sourced manufacturing and it worked out great. It was so cool to have MakerBots in the wild making parts for unbuilt MakerBots. We've got some ideas to do this again that we're going to announce later this year.
 
How important is your community to you? What do they do for the company?

The MakerBot community is awesome. Because we're open source and the community is so smart, we've seen a lot of participation in the research and development sector. For example, MakerBot Operator Tim Myrtle ripped the guts out of our temperature control code and replaced that section of code with some serious PID math which made the temperature of the nozzle much more stable. Because we're open source, our users know that the code and designs are theirs to hack on. They also know that if they improve their machine, they can share their improvement and everyone in the community benefits.

Can I download a Makerbot and print it out using Shapeways?

Go for it! There was talk a while back on the MakerBot Operator google group to replace all the lasercut parts with printable parts. Progress is being made and already there is a printable extruder!

Are Makerbots going to be able to self replicate?

One step at a time. Self replication is cool, but our first step is actually to get the machine so that it can be an autonomous manufacturing factory. I want to be able to go to sleep and wake up to a pile of MakerBotted things next to my MakerBot!
 
Why did you guys start Makerbot Industries?

We felt compelled. We decided to live the dream. We followed our hearts.

Shouldn't you guys be making the next YouTube or something (Bre used to work for Rocketboom, Etsy & MakeZine as their video producer)? Why 3D printing?

We love the internet, but web apps are very 90's. Personal Manufacturing the new black. We see the future and it's full of flying cars, replicators, and moon colonies. You can watch videos of the MakerBot Operators popping our collars from the moon colony on youtube when we get there.

You used to be a teacher, is that still kind of your job? To 'teach' 3D printing?

My mission in life is to be able to develop infrastructure that lets humans be creative. I feel that very tangibly inside my self. When I taught school that's what I did. When I made tutorial videos that's what I did. Adam, Zach and I are taking creative infrastructure to a new level by putting the tools of manufacturing into the hands of creative people. Everyday, even the long days packing boxes, we get excited about empowering people around to world create amazing things with our machines.
 

Atoms are the new bits

is an important article in Wired by Chris Anderson about the democratization of production. It will frame the discussion about the business that Shapeways is in. To sum it up, "In the age of democratized industry, every garage is a potential micro-factory, every citizen a potential micro-entrepreneur." An even shorter summation, "the long tail of things" is coming.

It is thought provoking and inspirational article and everyone should read it. In my opinion however it leaves out several crucial elements that will allow "atoms to become the new bits." 

1. Atoms will become bits only if the right infrastructure evolves.

Small entrepreneurs have to be able to defend their IP. Markets will have to be found. Customization and easy 3D modeling software will have to be created. Services such as legal, customer service, accounting, etc. will have to evolve. Customization tools will have to work. Recommendation engines for people, things and products that do not exist will have to be found, etc.

2. No amount of technology will replace the division of labor.

3. No amount of (available) innovation will eliminate comparative advantage.

4. Absolute advantage will not magically vanish overnight.

5. The invisible hand will still call the shots

6. Cooperation is not only a word on Sesame Street.

The most successful web publisher is not necessarily the best coder, builder of websites, writer of web frameworks, marketeer, authors, editor etc. Indeed even if he could do all of those things working with others would seem to be an efficient thing to do. The best designer in the world should probably spend more time designing than putting stuff in boxes. The best designer in the world might suck at marketing. The best designer in the world might be too expensive.

By working together and using the platforms available to us and using the skills of others in concert we will be able to achieve personal production. Networks of micro-businesses will define the future of commerce. 

The key factor for someone who has or wants their own micro-factory or who wants to be a micro-entrepreneur is to specialize. In the New Industrial Revolution the core question will still be, what is it that you can do better than others?    

Image Creative Commons, Attribution

This will be good news for all the modelers & designers on Shapeways. We have just released what is probably our most requested feature ever. We call it versioning  and it will make your world a happier place. 

If you look at one of your own models you can now see the "update model" button beneath it. If you click on that model you can upload a new file to replace the existing one. The new file will have the same URL as the previous one and all your comments, ratings, description etc. will be kept.

In this way incremental improvements to a model & design iterations can be kept with minimal hassle for the community member. Have fun trying it out. The line to help build a momument to Arno and his coder buddies starts to my right.

Stratasys and HP are going to make and distribute 3D printers together. This is huge news. As you may know Stratasys is the company behind the Dimension & Fortus 3D printer brands and the Red Eye 3D printing service. Stratasys use the FDM process and we use their machines for our Grey Robust material. Some quotes from the press release: “We believe the time is right for 3D printing to become mainstream,” said Stratasys Chairman and CEO Scott Crump. “We also believe that HP’s unmatched sales and distribution capabilities and Stratasys FDM technology is the right combination to achieve broader 3D printer usage worldwide. HP has made a similar move in this market before, capturing a dominant position in large-format 2D printers. Together we hope to repeat this success with 3D printers.”

The large printer manufacturers have now dabbled in the "low end" of the market with Dimension FDM printers breaking the $20,000 mark at one point. This is the same price as the entry level Zcorp machine, the 310. Objet's Alaris is around 40,000 if I'm not mistaken. Now the Dimension U-Print starts at $12,000. 3D Systems, another 3D printer manufacturer, recently acquired the assets for Desktop Factory which was a start up that wanted to produce a $5000 3D printer.

Stratasys working with HP means that they will have a lot more muscle on the distribution side and will push prices lower. HP's savvy in doing the whole "giving you the printer" and charging an arm and a leg for the ink thing. It would be interesting if they tried this with 3D printers. This is a huge shake up in a market coming to grips with the idea of manufacturing for everyone.

The race to lower prices and desktop machines is of course even more interesting given that the open source Rep Rap printer (and its positively dirt cheap $750 Makerbot Cupcake CNC variant) are both doing very well. This means that as of now the major 3D printer manufacturers are locked in a battle for your desktop while at the same time trying to figure out how to compete with open source. Awesome!

 Eric Finley and Aaron Trocola rock! I am continually astounded by the helpfulness and kindness of the Shapeways community.

As you know we recently introduced color 3D printing. To upload and create a color 3D printed file you have to work with a texture map and the VRML file format. These are both unfamiliar to a lot of people. Aaron therefore spend a considerable amount of time making a clear and well illustrated tutorial explaining the texture mapping of VRML files. His tutorial shows you how you can use the free Google Sketchup tool combined with the free and open source tool Meshlab to easily make textures out of images. His example of a simple photo frame is clear and the tutorial is a huge help to our community.  I would like to thank Aaron so so much. You can check out the tutorial which will help 3D modelers from noobs to ninjas deal with texture maps here. Besides writing super tutorials Aaron is Aeron203 on Shapeways and has some really well designed items in his Shop.

Just having one person such as Aaron do something so helpful would be amazing but over the past weekend we had two. Eric Finley made his Shapeways Tools Script for Blender. This script integrates and builds upon the work of another awesome member Loonsbury. Loonsbury's pricing script for Blender is now included in Eric's Tools. This means that community members have now made tools for Blender as well as for 3D Max in the form of Virtox's excellent pricing script. 

Eric's Shapeways Tools for Blender include a completely automatic wall thickness check. You are not dreaming. The script even color codes your wall thicknesses so you can see where your problems lie and just how problematic the walls are, right within Blender! Please help Eric by giving him feedback for his awesome app. You can check out his great fantasy Shop here.

The image above is an actual picture of Alien Grey by Jiovanie. It is 3D printed using our Full Color Sandstone material. This is our least expensive material and the pricing is $0.99 per Cubic Centimeter ($16.22 per cubic Inch + $ 1.50 start up costs per model, these prices include worldwide shipping). 

You can check out the video here:

Several community members have been making some wonderful things over the past months to showcase Full Color 3D printing.

Upload an image and it will be made into these wonderful marbles that cost $10. 

We turn any image into a color 3D printed depth map so you can see as well as touch your holiday snapshots for $29. Check them out here.

For Character modelers & animators this really means they can now take their avatar or their favorite character design and put it on their desktop. Designers can now come up with Co-creators that can be turned into any color, any pattern such as this Ipod accessory below. You just upload any image or pattern and the designer easily makes your object this color or pattern.

Expectation Management

The type of 3D printer we use for this process are Zcorp 650. We however are using a finishing technique that strengthens the 3D printed parts using rapid thermoset composites. Additionally we also use a one of a kind machine to resin infuse the models. This unique process makes the models much stronger and the colors much brighter, than was possible previously. We believe that people that have been exposed to Zcorp previously will be blown away with the results.

Having said that we do have to temper your enthusiasm somewhat. The resolution of the printer itself is low compared to the other processes we use. So the details and features will be less accurate. However, the color resolution is high so high detail in images is possible. The models are much stronger than traditional Zcorp processes but still fragile compared to the other things you can make with Shapeways.

We have more technical information here in the Design Rules for Full Color 3D printing here. The most crucial information is to realize that the wall thickness is 3mm and that fragile dainty models can not be made with this process. For a quick overview of the material you can check out our material page for Full Color Sandstone.

You can currently add color to your models by using a VRML file with texture map or by using x3D. You can find out how that works here.

Please tell us what you think and especially in the first weeks of this new material, let us know what needs to be improved.

    

Qi Pan, a Cambridge University researcher has developed proForma. ProForma is a tool that turns any normal webcam into a 3D scanner. I got to interview him and talk about his product, which if it worked could one of  the holy grails of mass customization. It would enable anyone to inexpensively turn things digital and then reproduce them.

Joris Peels: So how did you get started on this project?

Qi Pan: At the start of my PhD, I was interested in real-time 3D modeling of
outdoor scenes. However, several months in, I realised that current
processing power wasn't enough to model outdoor scenes well (due to
occlusions, lack of texture, etc). Therefore I turned my attention to
smaller objects, which would stand a better chance on current
hardware. With smaller objects though, they would always be sitting in
an environment, which you wouldn't want to model, which led me to the
idea of using a fixed camera and separating the object using motion.
All of the design choices made in the system were then tailored
towards making everything as fast as possible, whilst still producing
a reasonable output.
The project as it stands has taken around a year and a half to
develop, although not all of that time was spent on development (time
was also spent on publications and attending various conferences).
The hardest thing to do was to combine all of the system components
into a real-time system. The problem with real-time is that if any one
part of the system is not working well, your system just doesn't work
full stop. Therefore you need to make sure all parts are well
optimised and producing the right output at the right time for the
other components. When designing each component, the utmost care had
to be taken to ensure that we were doing things as efficiently as
possible, using the best available algorithms (or inventing our own if
none existed).
The system works in two stages.
The first stage is a tracker, and uses the partial 3D model we've
constructed to work out the position and orientation of the object
relative to the camera. This stage also tracks the position of
interest points (areas of high contrast change) in the images
frame-to-frame. After a significant enough motion is detected, a
key-frame plus the interest point tracks are passed to the
reconstruction stage. Only interest points on the object are tracked
as there is a mathematical constraint on the motion of points on a
rigid object (based on Epipolar geometry).
The reconstruction stage takes these feature tracks and triangulates
3D positions in order to form a cloud of points. This is then meshed
using a 3D Delaunay tetrahedralisation. This however merely partitions
the convex hull of the points into tetrahedra, so therefore we need to
employ a carving algorithm to remove incorrect tetrahedra from
concavities in the object. We formulated a very efficient
probabilistic carving algorithm to achieve this, which allows us to
obtain the surface of the object based on the interest points we've
seen in each keyframe.
This method requires a partial 3D model to track from, which isn't
available right at the start of reconstruction (but is later).
Therefore, our initialisation step differs slightly from normal
operation. We assume that at least part of the object falls within a
large circle at the centre of the image. We track interest points
inside this circle, and use rigid body motion constraints to ascertain
the orientation and position of the object relative to the camera.
Amazingly, this is possible, even if we have no idea about the 3D
positions of the interest points we are tracking! The system then
works as above once we have this initial orientation and position.
Yes, as long as it is textured enough! The system is based on interest
points, so the object must have enough areas of high contrast change.

Yes - we most certainly will! This project is more of a proof of
concept and just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can
achieve.
Yes - we're currently working on releasing one soon.

When?
I'm currently porting the software to the newest libraries (which
unfortunately means reimplementing lots of stuff from scratch) but in
a few months time we aim to release a linux-based demo which will
hopefully be followed by a windows based demo after that.