Geek-it-yourself: Milk scanning in 3D

MAKE magazine features this incredibly simple and interesting idea, make your own 3D displacement scanner with nothing more than Legos, a webcam, the right software, and milk.

3D objects can be scanned into a computer by essentially taking screen captures of small portions of the object known as 3D slices. To scan in something flat, like a drawing, you can use a regular scanner, but for 3D you need some way to capture the shape of an object, this is where the milk-scanner comes in. By capturing each small slice of the object, you can obtain an accurate mapping of it. Milk is used because it is white and easy to see on a scanned 3D object.

This is a simple way to make a milk-scanner, and my geeky heart is oh-so-twitterpated. Milk-scanning is just plain cool.