Sunday, December 30, 2007

Zscanner 800


The Zscanner 800 looks like a nice gift for the budding 3d developer. It's a handheld trinocular camera with laser LED projector that interpolates points in 3d, in real time.

Just the right size for scanning the faces of your whole family so you can update their secondlife avatars. Output is .stl files.

At $50k for this version getting models from the real world into the virtual world is getting cheaper all the time. The intellectual property ramifications of this technology coming within the reach of common citizens must be astounding.

This is still out of reach for me, but I would not mind renting one for a few days.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Switching to linux

Lots of people are thinking about switching to linux these days. There's a website called Groklaw dedicated to documenting legal events, and they have quite a useful page on the subject. Rather than working up my own, I'll point you there.