Image courtesy of hin255 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Do you own an XBox 360 with a connect or a smartphone?  Then you own a 3D scanner!  Two of the ones that have caught our eye are the 123D Catch and Kinect.

You can read a great article about 123D Catch which is a app you can download for your iPhone or PC from Autodesk at http://www.123dapp.com/catch.  It essentially uses multiple photos to piece together a very good quality 3D rendering!

If you’re a video game fan like me you might also have an XBox 360 and a Kinect at home.  The Kinect at its core is a camera/microphone and IR laser scanner combined that allows you to interact with games without a traditional controller.  You can read more about its inner workings at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect.  Many people already modify and use them for 3D scanning and printing such the 3D Experience and this latest cloud based 3D printer project on Kickstarter by Volumental.

There’s also of course options like the Photon 3D Scanner that we featured on our post about crowd-funding or any of the high end scanners by Faro and the like, but we really feel the mass market future will be in cheap devices people already have for something else.  We look forward to your thoughts!