The 3D Revolution Will Be Digitized
Lynx CEO Chris Slaughter shows off the Lynx A digitizing camera. A stereo camera is on the other side of the slate.
While the 3D printing revolution is clearly underway, really it has barely started. There are several printers on the market, and numerous software tools. But there are still spaces to open up. The next: 3D scanners. Because it’s easier to get started in 3D printing by copying or cloning a real-world object than by sketching it in a modeling app.
At SxSW, Makerbot chief Bre Pettis introduced the Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, a turntable-and-laser setup that lets users digitize the 3D measurements of smallish items (8 x 8 inches or smaller). Details on the device — price, availability, and so on — were scarce. But Makerbot isn’t the only company working in this space.
A much less well-funded product may be coming from the makers of the Moedls 3D Model Viewer software. Similar in concept to the Makerbot scanner, the Mobile 3D Laser Scanner uses two small lasers (or just one, but you’ll get blank spots in your scan), a turntable, and an imaging device — in this case an iPhone — to scan items in much the same way as the Makerbot Digitizer.
The Moedls setup should run for about $350 with two little lasers and turntable. As of a few days ago, it’s a Kickstarter project.
And then there’s the interesting free-space scanner from Lynx Laboratories. Hidden in a startup arena at SxSW, I found Lynx CEO Chris Slaughter. His company has crammed a stereo camera setup and a powerful Nvidia graphic card, with custom software, into an ungainly but effective hand-held scanning appliance, the Lynx A.
A Moedls laser, on a small suction mount.
The Lynx A can be used for taking accurate measurements of architectural features — that is, human-scale or bigger — or for creating 3D digitized models of items in the real world. To scan a car, for example, you would point the Lynx’s camera toward it, and then sidestep in a circle around the car while keeping the camera on the car. The software will take the imagery and your movement and build a 3D model. Lynx is also on Kickstarter.
Slaughter says that his massive scanning hardware is a temporary solution. Eventually smartphones will have the graphics capabilities to handle his software.
There will be room in the digitizing market for both the highly precise, controlled laser-and-turntable scanners, as well as free-space scanners that can handle items of any size. There will no doubt be other ways to scan physical objects. Maybe, eventually, we’ll be able to create a clonable 3D model by just glancing at an object while wearing Google glasses (and then wiggling our heads to give the camera some depth data). The point is that 3D printing hardware is not sufficient to create the 3D revolution. We need more and better tools, like digitizers.
The laser printer was introduced in 1984, but it wasn’t until Aldus shipped PageMaker for the Mac, in 1985, that the desktop publishing revolution really started. The pieces of the 3D game are, likewise, still being placed.
-Rafe
See also
I interview the CEOs of Makerbot and 3D Systems (CNET)
Audio version of this column
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Controlling the Human Pixel, with Light and Sound
The BlinkFX Wink is a light-up wristband for large audiences.
Bluetooth, WiFi and cellular data may be nearly ubiquitous, but there are interesting edge cases where none of these channels will get the job done. One of those is the large music or sports event, where the event runner may want to broadcast some information to attendees’ mobile devices, in order to turn the attendees into pixels that make a light show of the entire arena.
In the old days, you’d just hope that everyone in the audience had a lighter, and then they’d all naturally start waving theirs around when the music got suitably epic. Today, the smartphone replaces the lighter. And the great thing about that, from a production standpoint, is that an event organizer can sidestep the messy job of instructing humans when to light their fire, or do the wave. They can control the device directly.
At SxSW I saw two companies bringing the you-are-the-light-show model to large venues. Both are fairly new and haven’t been used much lately, but you can expect to see them show up more.
Sonic Notify converts the audience’s smartphones to lighting elements.
First up: Sonic Notify. This company has a code library that can be embedded into a band’s or team’s smartphone app. The app listens for audio tones (in the 19 to 20 kHz range) and, when it hears the right noises, it can turn on the smartphone screen in whatever color the app asks for. Or do a lot more… but for the time being, at least when used by groups like Swedish House Mafia, that’s what it does. Assuming the smartphone holders have the SHM app.
The audio channels carry over the noise of a loud concert or event, but not so far that the organizer can’t control screens differently in different zones. So a wave a color is possible, even if pictures and words can’t be displayed as they can if you have a regiment of trained people sitting in seats holding color placards.
Sonic Notify’s solution has the advantage of using existing hardware — users’ phones, and a venue’s speakers — but then it does require that users dig their phones out of their pockets at the right times and hold them up. And some of them are going to get dropped.
Another solution is the Blink FX Wink system. On the user side, it’s a cheap little wristband with a few multi-color LEDs and a battery in it. The wristbands get control data over infrared, which is a very cheap remote communication scheme. Roadies do have to set up IR transmitters, though.
As with Sonic Notify, the system can be controlled by standard DMX lighting controls, and resolution of the mass display is limited to zone control, not individuals — although with this system, you can have some wristbands on different “channels” to create a flickering effect out there in the stands.
Blink FX bands cost about $5 each. They can be sold or given away, and when they’re branded, they become a nice little souvenir with a logo on it. They really don’t do much once they leave the arena, but the company is planning on releasing a home version of the IR transmitter for about $150, so you can throw your own raves.
Infrared or sonic, you can’t transmit a whole ton of data through a non-radio channel. The Sonic Notify people told me they max out at about 200 bytes per second, or “old modem speed,” they say. But you can do cool things like send telemetry or control signals, or use audio tones for local handshake before sending more data over a faster network (that’s what Evernote Hello’s Connect feature does).
There are a few companies working on using audio in these ways; using light as a signal is more limiting. If you’re working on a system that depends on proximity of other devices, it might be worth checking these audio guys out.
- Rafe
See also
Xylobands
Chirp.io
Sonic Share
Shopkick Rewards Shoppers With a Silent Signal
Former Google Wave developers use soundwaves to share data between devices
Audio version of this column
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Cycloramic Makes the iPhone Dance
Cycloramic gets ready to spin.
You think the iPhone’s buzzer is just for alerting you when your phone rings? Think again. A former aerospace engineer, Bruno Francois, has released a little app, Cycloramic, that uses the iPhone’s buzzer to actually move the phone. Cycloramic is part party trick and part science experiment, and also a potentially useful panoramic video capture utility.
Turn the app on, stand up your phone on a flat, level, smooth surface, and it will control the phone’s buzzer to get it to turn in a complete circle while capturing video. Yes, it will make you giggle. But set one on an overturned plate in the middle of a dinner table, and it will capture a shot you could otherwise never get.
The app is 99 cents, and worth it.
I reached out to Cycloramic’s creator, Bruno Francois, the moment I read about this app in David Pogue’s Brightest Ideas of 2012 column. What had possessed Francois to write it?
“I want to find things that are different from the usual,” he told me. “I like to combine unexpected things.” While Francois was reminded of his old Nokia phone that used to buzz its way across the table when it rang, he said that coming up with the idea for Cycloramic was more about being methodical than just pursuing an old memory.
“I wrote down twelve things the phone can do, and what else it can do with those things,” he told me. Things like using the speaker as a microphone, for example. But it was using the buzzer as a locomotor that stuck. And then the hacking began.
“The problem is, if you just turn on the buzzer, the phone won’t turn. We had the find the perfect cycle frequency,” he said. Also, apparently, the app uses the phone’s compass to know when it’s turned a full circle, since it rotates at different speeds on different surfaces.
As far as I can tell, everyone who’s seen this app loves it, including the great and powerful Woz, who sent Francois a video created using the app, from his own kitchen. Evernote CEO Phil Libin had this to say: “Tell him to make it face tracking. I think iOS 6 has an API to detect faces, so should be easy. Will freak people out.” I didn’t think the app could rotate the phone in both directions, but Francois replied, to me, “This is actually on our list of future features.”
Also upcoming: More tolerance for different surfaces, and the capability to take panoramic photos, not just videos.
The moral for this goofball story? The CPU isn’t the only general-purpose component in the devices you’re developing for. The electronics in our gadgets are far more flexible than we may think. I’m reminded of Heart Rate, which uses the iPhone’s LED “flash” and camera to measure heartbeat, and the Triggertrap app that can take a picture when the phone encounters a strong magnetic field, using the compass sensor (I don’t know why someone would use that, but that’s probably a failure of imagination on my part). And then there’s music, as played by disk drive stepper motors and Formula One engines.
Of course, this level of hackery does have its limitations. If the iPhone didn’t have a flat bottom this wouldn’t work (so don’t hold your breath for an Android version); likewise if the buzzer wasn’t built just so. But that’s not the point. The point is that these little gadgets we carry around are still capable of magic. And that magic, sometimes, can end up as a business.
-Rafe
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Mind Games
LeWeb conference chair Loic Le Meur wears a Muse headband while writing an email.
Usually in Opportunity Notes I try to identify the opportunity that a new product or technology stands for. Today I’ve got a new technology, but I’m not sure what the opportunity is. It’s worth exploring, though.
The company is Interaxon and the product is Muse. It’s a brainwave-reading headband that CEO Ariel Garten demonstrated for the first time publicly at Le Web in Paris this week. In her demo, conference chair Loic Le Meur, wearing the headband that fits like a pair of glasses but over the forehead, typed an email to his wife, and as he did so, the font that showed up on-screen varied with his emotional state: Flowery script when he was writing loving words, a more aggressive bold san serif when he talked about how how her work “rocked.”
The Muse headband reads EEGs. With current technology, it’s enough to determine rough mental activity level and to some extent mood, but the four-sensor headband is nowhere close to reading thoughts or even intention. While you could, arguably, train your brain to move to a certain state to control an activity, the technology isn’t meant to replace a keyboard, mouse, or even a button (there is at least one toy based on EEG control, though).
The email in question.
So the question is, what can you do with a headband that measures mental activity, or focus, or mood? Garten discussed professional applications, such as athletics. The headband could be used to reinforce players getting into “the zone.” I suppose one could also use it for creative professions. Maybe an IDE could lock out a programmer if it detected he was not focusing and was likely to write bad code.
Maybe, as Garten says, the applications are games. Again, not for control, but for mood. Perhaps your avatar in a online world could vary depending on your state of mind. Or non-player characters would be aggressive or compliant, depending.
The Muse could be used to generate yet another stream of data to correlate with other personal instrumentation products that read physical activity level, heart rate, location, sleep state, and so on. If we’re going to end up covered in sensors like an astronaut, might as well record brain activity too, right?
Or perhaps if I were wearing it right now it could help me focus so I could figure out what other cool things could be done with it. Assuming people can be convinced to wear it, there must be some creative applications.
The $199 Muse comes with an SDK for developers interested in exploring the EEG data stream.
-Rafe
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Who Will Be the Instagram of Light Field Photography?
Audio versionThe $400 Lytro camera is one of the most technologically magical devices a consumer can buy today: It’s a camera that captures not pictures, but light itself. This means you can adjust how the image is formed after you take it. In particular, you can adjust how the picture is focused. It’s amazing.
MIT’s Kshitij Marwah says that this filter, placed in front of a standard digital camera sensor, enables it to become a light field camera. Lytro uses a similar technology.
But the current Lytro is, still, an awkward camera that doesn’t take especially great photos, its magic post-processing capability notwithstanding. Light field photography is the future, but this future is probably not going to look as weird as the current Lytro indicates.
Eventually we’ll get light field photography where we live: smartphones. How? Perhaps with a new sensor package from Lytro itself, or perhaps from a lab at MIT. Last week I talked with Kshitij Marwah, a researcher at Camera Culture in the MIT Media Lab, who showed me how a team he’s on is going to bring the magic to the rest of us.
I won’t pretend that I understand exactly how Marwah’s special filters and computational photography software turns standard sensors into light field-capable cameras, but if he is right that he can refine the technology and make light field cameras as small and cheap as current smartphone cameras, then the digital photography business as we know it is in for an entertaining upheaval.
Here’s what I am looking forward to: Non-destructive Instagram-like services. Instead of photo sharing services that mutilate flat digital images in the name of art or fun, we’ll get third-party light field processing that does much more with images. Changing focus of an image is just one of the things you can do when you have light field data. You can also change apparent aperture, you can extract some 3D data, and you can manipulate light to work for you deep inside an image, in ways far beyond what you can do with current software.
The state of photography has always existed as a continuum between image capture and post-capture editing. Light field photography will push the locus, for many people, further towards the post-capture side than it’s ever been. That represents an opportunity for teams who can come up with new ways (algorithms and interfaces) to deal with light field data. For all I know, Instagram may end up being the Instagram of this new photography, but it could just as easily be a new company that takes on this role. Or, quite likely, a large player like Instagram, Google, or Yahoo will acquire its way into a more powerful position in this future market.
Note: I’m aware this column is longer than my standard 250 words. I hope you don’t mind.
- Rafe
See also:
Lytro’s light field camera technology could supercharge future iPhones (Ars Technica)
Lytro’s Ren Ng on the Future of Photography (TEDx video)
The Impossible Project resurrects instant film (Opportunity Notes)
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