Last friday I went to visit an industrial machinery exibition, with lots of big welding robots and stuff. Turns out that 3D scanning is fairly commonplace in the industrial sector, only it’s normally used for automated quality control – make something out of steel or whatever and then optically verify that it meets the specifications. The devices were kind of big and just about all of them were variations on the laser-line-scanning apparatus. There were some good ideas though, so I guess my trip wasn’t a complete waste of time.

A good one was to use a modified flash bulb to project a pattern across the target object – a technique usually done with a beamer. I might attempt to make something like that myself, although I foresee some issues with focusing the pattern. It seems like it’s doable, though.