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Comment by slobiwan | Hacker News Reader

This is a pointer to a review from 2015 for a product that's no longer commercially available. Seems like perhaps the technology wasn't as mature or capable as the review seems to indicate, if it didn't make it.

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Having owned and used the device I can attest to that. It was hard to get it to work reliably, and it certainly couldn't handle either small finely detailed items or bigger spaces like whole rooms.

It would do part of a room fine and then lose tracking and never be able to re-establish tracking and you would have to start all over again.

The V2 (Structure Core) has a built in IMU and is much better at keeping tracking. The quality of the USB link between the sensor and the computer also makes a big difference. (not an expert in this particular area) but iirc USB is like TCP in that if a packet is missing or corrupted it'll ask for it to be resent, it seems like the Structure sensors are quite sensitive to this and missing more then a few frames leads to alignment issues. That being said I wouldn't call the experience user friendly on any level, their software is really really bad too, I've had to write some tools to modify their save files so that I can rotate the reconstruction area because that's not a feature of the software. Definitely strongly dis-recommend buying one.

Mobiles have built in LiDAR and TOF now, not to mention it was possible to build 3d models with just a phone using photogrammetry. ARKit and ARCore have also come a long way to replacing things like this. It's just all built into phones now.

It's not that simple. Whatever you do will still need a good amount of cleaning up and post production work.

This [1] is a good survey of what's possible using iphone12's flash type lidar and if you check the author's Sketchfab work you can see the results.

[1] https://albn.medium.com/3d-scanning-with-the-iphone-lidar-8c...

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