Joy Unbound

Scanners are very nice. However, the problem with ordinary scanners is that they have zero-focus; in other words, if you scan a 3D object the parts of that object that are farthest away from the glass surface will be blurry (and very easily). The cameras are specially fine-tuned to the distance of the glass and are meant to scan flat things such as documents — a single sheet of paper facing the camera on the flat glass surface. Or maybe photographs.

But the point is that these scanners do not focus. And this is where my idea sprouts. Imagine some sort of device that is like one of those arcade claw things (remember Toy Story? ooooh, THE CLAW). Instead of the claw, you could place a photo-camera through from the top. There would be some sort of balance mechanism or grip to make sure that the lens are ground level. There could be different fittings pieces for putting the lens through as many cameras will have lens that come in many different sizes. There could also be some sort of height adjustment for those lens that are long (or perhaps so that you could adjust the distance that you want without zooming in). Additionally, there could be like a ring of white LEDs around the where the lens fit in so that it would illuminate everything in front of the camera lens.

On the x- and y-axis there could be a ruler measurements (preferably in SI units). Furthermore, on the two or four rails that contain this ruler (and that you slide the camera cranes along) there could be these holes at increments of 1cm; these holes could be used to lock an axis into place.

The photographer — you, or the user — could place a motherboard on the flat table surface that this device sits on, and then decide to maybe snap a photograph every 2cm on both axis. In the end, you would have probably almost 100 photographs. You would then feed this into the program that would come with this device. This program would take the photographs and stitch them into a high-resolution panorama. Depending at what increment you went by could also determine the quality of this panorama. If you took a photograph at every 1cm you could easily end up with a gigantic handful of photographs, but the program could use this to try and attain the flattest yet highest quality panorama (though at the edges of this panorama lens warping would occur as usual).

This could come in three packages:

1. Everything but the table surface — you plan on using your own table or own surface to assemble this device over.
2. You get the table with everything else. The surface of this table would be a white plastic. Beneath it would be a large series of white fluorescent glass tubes arranged at just the right distance from one another to evenly illuminate the white plastic. This is kind of like the thing that they put your x-rays on when they want to look at it. You would have to buy your own tubes though (for the sake of safer and cheaper delivery).
3. Specially designed version of the second package where you could take a Rebel XT (or some common high-end photography camera), plug it into the device, and have the program automate the entire photographing and panorama for you. Just put the object you want to “scan” under the device, click Start, and wait for the process to complete.

What you could do with this device:

• Produce simple yet highly accurate 3D models of small and medium sized objects (like motherboards and computer chassis)
• Produce a super-ridiculously-high-quality “2D scan” of an object (like a PCB, circuit board, motherboard, or the circuit-board to your MP3 player :\ )
  • So that you don’t have to post an awful OH I CANT HOLD THIS CAMERA STILL AND MY LIGHTING SUCKS blurry picture of your project online
  • So that you can make textures for a computer game, which you could also use perhaps as a reference for a map or model
• Produce bitmaps and models for bump- and parallax-mapped textures
• Produce proper scans of objects with 3D elements that would otherwise turn out blurry to unreadable by an ordinary scanner
• Oh the possibility! Do I have to list everything for you? o_o

That is the general outline of my idea. There could maybe be three different sizes for this — small, medium, large — based on how big of a working surface area you need. But it would be really cool to have a device like this around. There just isn’t any decent or proper device out there for doing this.