London design studio Sample & Hold has been asked to scan all kinds of things: a shoe, a carrot, the heads of every member of the Barcelona FC team.
The firm has even worked with a company in Knightsbridge, London, that makes casts of babies' feet and heads.
"Occasionally they have a client who wants a head scan of their kid," explains Sample & Hold director Sam Jackson.
Those scans have been used for bronze casts of the child's head, and the 3D scan speeds up that process.
Sample & Hold doesn't need lasers to do this 3D scanning. Instead, it uses plain old 2D cameras. The trick is to use lots of them - 67 in total.
The subject, or object, is placed in a rig with each camera positioned in a sort of photographic sphere around them. With the click of a button, an image is captured from 67 different angles. These can then be merged together in computer software to form a 3D model.
It is called photogrammetry, the process of simultaneously capturing visual and spatial information. As a technology it is surprisingly old. People have been experimenting with different forms of it for more than 150 years but it is currently "having a moment", in part thanks to the low cost of digital cameras.
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