I am often asked why we don’t develop mobile applications for iPhone or Android. The answer is simple: my3dscanner requires much better quality photos than a mobile phone can fetch (actually everything said about mobile phone scanning concerns video).
To get good or very good 3D reconstruction our engine requires very good quality set of photos. Our engine is very picky. Your image must detect the smallest feature on the object’s surface to reconstruct it in 3D. The images must be great!
Mobile application will give a user a misleading and false feeling that few (and even many) shots with a mobile phone (even with a high resolution) can reconstruct an object in 3D. Maybe they can, but not with my3dscanner at the moment.
The only way to get decent results from my3dscanner is to use good optics digital camera, textured object, very good photography techniques (lighting, focus, depth of view, etc). So we don’t want to encourage users to make crappy photos and upload them to my3dscanner so both user and us are disappointed.
The problems with mobile phones are:
1. Their optics is Spartan. Even if resolution is high (say 8 MP as in a new iPhone 4S or alike), other optics parameters won’t allow you to get good quality images.
2. Mobile phones ergonomics are good (sometimes) for telephone conversations. But try to take a steady shot with an iPhone. No way! Just pushing sensor button inevitably generates motion blur. This kills quality photography.
3. My3dscanner 3D reconstruction is all about taking quality pictures. You should take a moment to think about a scene, analyze an object, and choose the right photography tactics. If you have a mobile phone in one hand and a girl (or boy) friend in the other (or a bottle of a beer which is my preference), there is no way you can concentrate and make a good scan.
I know, these arguments are not exciting and rather boring, but they are true. We do not want to waste our users and our time just to get a WOW reaction; we’ve had enough of that. We want our users to create something useful. Quality photos mean quality 3D with my3dscanner.
