

On the front, you'll find transparent plastic protecting two cameras and an IR sensor, a setup that will immediately evoke references to Microsoft's Kinect. Though, after some light use, the material had already begun wearing down on the corners, so that may well answer our question. Why the company didn't coat it in a soft-touch material, I'm not entirely sure - that material tends to provide a solid, comfortable grip. There's a grip in the center, surrounded by a glossy, translucent white plastic. The rectangular handheld is covered in a gray soft-touch material with large, engraved Sense logos on either side. On closer inspection, there's nothing too frightening going on here. The scanner looks vaguely menacing the first time you see it held up to a stranger's head. When the 3D Systems team gave us a sneak peek of the Sense a few weeks ago, we immediately compared it to a staple gun. 3D Systems' Sense takes a wholly different approach: This is a $400 handheld scanner that can digitize an entire human being. MakerBot unveiled its solution back at SXSW: the $1,400 Digitizer, a rotating, desktop scanning bed capable of capturing objects up to eight inches by eight inches. At the same time, the race to dominate the category has often caused companies to ignore the question of how those without extensive CAD experience can create 3D files in the first place.

In recent years, 3D-printing companies have largely focused on the printers themselves, which have gotten cheaper and easier to use. If the product is indeed what 3D Systems claims, it could fill a major hole in the consumer 3D-printing market.
CUBIFY 3D SCANNER PORTABLE
Sense is one of those propositions that seems too good to be true: a user-friendly, (relatively) portable 3D scanner capable of capturing objects up to 10 feet by 10 feet, and at a fraction of the price of the competition. For starters, I'm not completely sure what I plan on doing with all these scans, but while such questions are entirely logical, they've yet to curb my enthusiasm for the device. Such issues were mere roadblocks in my strange one-man journey to 3D-scan the world. Some subjects were too small to be scanned, some too fidgety and, in the case of my attempted 3D selfie, not nearly flexible enough. This extends well beyond the human race, into the realms of animal, vegetable, plush toy and fruit bowl. Still, it remains to be seen how it behaves in practice.If we've crossed paths in the past week, there's a pretty good chance I've scanned you. You then walk around the object you're scanning and the device warns you if you go outside of the optimal range. From the get-go you can choose whether you're going to scan small, medium, or large objects. The fact that it's small, relatively cheap, and that it's handheld doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in the quality of the scans.ģD Systems put a lot of work in making the device user-friendly, and it shows. That said, the Sense still has to be tethered to a computer, so it's not exactly portable. It's also handheld so, in theory, you can use it to scan much larger objects than you can with the Digitizer.

The device is much smaller than MakerBot's Digitizer and a lot cheaper too, more than three times less expensive. Easily heal, smooth, remove features and fill holes with the Sense quick edit software," it adds. "With features such as automatic object recognition, objects can be extracted from busy backgrounds, scanning only the object you want. Its hand-held mobility gives you the freedom to scan anything, anywhere, anytime," 3D Systems boasts.
CUBIFY 3D SCANNER SOFTWARE
"Sense includes powerful, intuitive software that lets you crop and enhance with easy, automated tools. One of the big and unexpected hurdles behind getting involved with 3D printing is getting good at 3D modeling.Ī 3D scanner solves this problem by making it possible to create models of existing objects without too much 3D modeling experience. 3D Systems has announced the Sense 3D scanner, a new handheld scanner available for the relatively cheap $399 (€298) from the makers of the Cubify line of 3D printers.ģD printers are old news 3D scanners are all the rage these days and for good reason.
