Check out this amazing piece of software coming out of Cambridge, that turns your little old web cam into a surprisingly accurate 3D scanner. It’s called ProFORMA for short, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition for long, and it works by generating a point cloud through a Delaunay tetrahedralization process. Which means it uses 2D XY vertices to generate 3D polygonal triangles, forming the mesh of the object you’re scanning. Man that sounded smart, but in truth I just Googled it and found this paper, ha.

LINK: The Delaunay tetrahedralization from Delaunay triangulated surfaces

Given a surface mesh F in R ³ with vertex set S and consisting of Delaunay triangles, we want to construct the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S.We present an algorithm which constructs the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S given a bounded degree spanning subgraph T of F. It accelerates the incremental Delaunay triangulation construction by exploiting the connectivity of the points on the surface. If the expected size of the Delaunay triangulation is linear, we prove that our algorithm runs in O(n log^* n) expected time, speeding up the standard randomized incremental Delaunay triangulation algorithm, which is O(nlog n) expected time in this case.We discuss how to find a bounded degree spanning subgraph T from surface mesh F and give a linear time algorithm which obtains a spanning subgraph from any triangulated surface with genus g with maximum degree at most 12g for g>0 or three for g=0.

But enough of this, “math” and “science”, check out the video below to see this program designed by Department of Engineering student Qui Pan in action!

LINK: Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner

It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are. Then things go over my head, involving a process called Delaunay tetrahedralisation to turn the 2D surfaces into a 3D model.