Microsoft's MobileFusion lets you scan 3D objects via smartphone

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By Adario Strange2015-08-25 19:21:01 UTC

The teams at Microsoft Research regularly come up with fascinating approaches to technology innovation — the latest is software that turns your smartphone into a 3D scanner.

Microsoft's app, called MobileFusion, allows you to point and shoot to create 3D images that can later be used for 3D-printed objects or, as the team suggests, augmented reality objects.

MobileFusion appears to be a mobile extension of the ideas behind the earlier Kinect Fusion, which allows the Kinect to build 3D maps of rooms in the real world.

The idea behind MobileFusion is brilliant, but similar technology has been shown off before. Switzerland-based software startup Dacuda, as well as a team of developers at ETH Zurich's Department of Computer Science have both demonstrated mobile 3D scanning via smartphone in the past.

In all three demonstrations, users are able to shoot real world images and turn them into 3D constructs with the same ease as a shooting a video. But the team at Microsoft claims that its method for mobile 3D scanning is better than other solutions because, among other things, an Internet connection isn't necessary.

"Unlike existing state-of-the-art methods, which produce only point-based 3D models on the phone, or require cloud-based processing, our hybrid GPU/CPU pipeline is unique in that it creates a connected 3D surface model directly on the device at 25Hz," reads the team's research paper detailing the project.

However, one odd twist is that the phone used in the demonstration isn't a Windows Phone but, you guessed it, an iPhone.

"As Microsoft researchers, we often push ourselves to innovate cross-platform in an effort to best showcase our technology to the world," Shahram Izadi, one of the researchers working on MobileFusion, told Mashable.

"With work such as MobileFusion, we wanted a chance to show customers on the iOS what Microsoft can offer. We are working to make sure the system works with all types of mobile devices, including Windows Phone, Android and iPhone devices."

The team says it hopes to introduce the software to the general public at some point but, at present, there is no release date scheduled.

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Source: Microsoft's MobileFusion lets you scan 3D objects via smartphone