Scanners

MakerBot founder Bre Pettis kicked off the first day of the South By Southwest Interactive festival (SXSW) running from March 8-17 in Austin, Texas, by introducing a desktop 3D scanner dubbed the MakerBot Digitizer designed to let users scan a physical item and digitize it so it can be replicated using a 3D printer.  Read More

Computer models are typically created by specialists using dedicated CAD software or animation packages. The more detailed the object, the more time and experience it takes to make it. One shortcut would be to scan a real life version of the desired object (if it exists), but 3D scanners are generally expensive, bulky machines that aren't practical for the average person. The advent of affordable, desktop-sized 3D scanners like the CADScan3D could change all that – and presents troubling legal issues for the growing maker movement.  Read More

As more information becomes available in digital formats, it can be a little frustrating to not be able to simply bookmark or save any documents printed on ordinary paper. There are plenty of articles, recipes, letters, contracts, etc. that would be much more convenient if they were saved on a flash drive, which is where the NoteMark would come in handy. With a laser-projected sight and built-in camera that captures documents as high-definition photos, the ballpoint pen/scanner could be an invaluable tool for quickly digitizing and storing paper documents.  Read More

If you were into photography in the 80s or earlier, chances are that you now have a bunch of slides and negatives that have sat forgotten for many years. Should that be the case, or if you even still use analog film, then the Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner might be for you. It allows you to convert 35mm negs and slides into digital images, using your smartphone.  Read More

While we’ve seen developments that could see T-ray spectrometers featuring in a future handheld tricorder-like device, good ol’ X-rays could also get a guernsey thanks to an engineering team from the University of Missouri. The team has invented an accelerator about the size of a stick of gum that can create X-rays and other forms of radiation, opening up the possibility of cheap and portable X-ray scanners.  Read More

Composers who want to know what their hand-written sheet music will sound like may soon have a new tool at their disposal. Using a hand-held device hooked up to their tablet or laptop, they could “play” that music in real time, wherever they were – even if a piano or other instrument was nowhere in sight. That’s the idea behind the Gocen, a prototype device being developed by a team from the Tokyo Metropolitan University.  Read More

So you’re unlucky enough to be hit with the real C-word: cancer. That sucks. But what can be worse is that many current medical scanning techniques come with large levels of radiation. The current practice of combining PET (Positron emission tomography) and CT (computerized tomography) scans produces good images, but the cost is high: a dose of radiation ten times the background amount the average human gets in a year. And that’s just one scan. Many cancer patients have to endure multiple scans. A new PET scanner from physicists at the University of Oslo (UiO) cuts the radiation dose in half and is also small enough to fit inside an MR scanner. Although it was developed for animals, the researchers say it could be easily adapted for human clinical examinations.  Read More

3-D modelling is maturing fast. Increasingly affordable solutions are not only raising general awareness of 3D workflows but revolutionizing design, engineering and manufacturing processes. The case in point is German-based David-laserscanner - a system that lets users turn everyday objects into 3D models at a low cost.  Read More

Like it or not, we're now living in a digital world, with physical media of all types being superseded by new formats. This inevitably leads to us all being left with a physical legacy, and transferring the content that makes up this legacy to digital formats is often a tiresome chore. One possible quick and easy solution to transforming photos from physical to digital is iPICS2GO, a new device from ION Audio that literally turns your iPhone into a scanner.  Read More