How 3-D Scanning Is Used in Our Lives
Real estate and construction companies employ land surveyors to determine the physical properties of a lot or a large area. Throughout the decades, the equipment used for this job has become more sophisticated. Now, you can reach out to companies that offer 3-D laser scanning services in Utah. The depth sensors allow them to gather accurate information about a piece of land.
Land surveying can be a larger-scale project when it comes to laser scanning. This technique also has other practical uses. Here are some that might be familiar to you:
3-D Modeling and Animation
For the most part, the purpose of scanning is to capture a physical form and then convert it to digital information. When it comes to 3-D graphics, you can make it “hand-drawn,” which means that the 3-D model has to be written or coded into the system from scratch. For example, if you are going to create a cube, you will have to type in all the coordinates and vertices into the application. As you can imagine, this will exponentially get harder for more complex images.
When you are creating a model of a person or a face, doing that can manually prove to be a daunting task. This is where 3-D laser scanning comes in. You can scan a real face or body into the computer and then trim off unwanted graphical artifacts. This works by having the laser project a grid onto the person, and this will show their contours or curves. These are then converted into information that can be exported into the 3-D modeling application. It saves everyone a lot of time and tedious effort.
Managing Traffic Obstacles
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a technology used in cars mainly to detect the distance and shape of obstacles. This information is used in tandem with the GPS to help drive the future of driver-less vehicles forward. To improve recognition accuracy, the 3-D information has to be refined and annotated properly. This is then fed and taught to the AI model. So the next time it goes out for a run, it should have a better understanding of the environment around it as captured by the cameras.
Digital Security
Facial recognition on phones used to be exploitable. Photo cameras were used for this, but in reality, they can only scan the 2-D image of a face. It will recognize the proportions and positions of the facial parts, and not much else. So when you have a picture of the device owner, you can have it unlocked by dangling the photograph in front of the phone.
The manufacturers have learned, and now you have phones that have time-of-flight sensors in them. This will let them detect the three-dimensional features of a person’s face by analyzing how long the light signals bounce back to them.
In the future, people will discover more uses for 3-D or depth scanning. The world operates in three dimensions, and it is just right to have some of our tools and machines see it in the same way.
