DIY Life

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.

Instead of rehashing the topic with another full-length how-to, I'd like to point out that our own Will O'Brien wrote an incredibly thorough and fantastically photographed how-to on the very subject. His seven-part tutorial lives over at our world-famous sister-site Engadget.

Will is one of DIY Life's resident technology gurus and has written a ton of awesome stuff also for Hack-a-day, (another sister site of ours) for the geeks of the world. Please note that some of Will's work is not safe for dummies (NSFD) or the technologically challenged. Hack-a-day is however, quite DIY and geek-it-yourself friendly. If you get squeamish trying to program a VCR (you seriously still have one of those?) then please look away now, and by all means, hide the children.

[via Engadget]