A new Microsoft Research project, called MobileFusion, will let you create high-quality 3D images in real time, using your mobile phone with the same ease as taking stills or videos on your device.
From news published onlne at Inside MicroSoft Research last week, researchers on the project released video and more detailed content (see the PDF link below), as well as commentary:
“What this system effectively allows us to do is to take something similar to a picture, but it’s a full 3D object,” said Peter Ondruska, a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University who worked on the project while he was an intern at Microsoft Research.
Pushmeet Kohli and Shahram Izadi are the principle researcher on the project, and will present MobileFusion in early October at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.
The researchers say MobileFusion (download the full research paper here), is “better than other methods for 3D scanning with a mobile device because it doesn’t need any extra hardware, or even an Internet connection, to work.” Using a regular camera phone without WIFI connection, the system can work anywhere.
Here’s a video of the project in action:
[youtube url=”https://youtu.be/8M_-lSYqACo” fs=”1″ hd=”1″ loop=”1″ rel=”0″ showsearch=”0″]
Kohli and Izadi are currently testing and preparing the system to work on all the major mobile platforms, including Windows Phone, Android and iOS devices. Izadi said they hope to eventually make it available to the general public in some form, but the researchers have not set a release date or planned rollout.
