When designing a new product, it’s the details that appear seamless to daily life that are the most effective. Or, when preserving artefacts and art objects for future generations, it would be a disappointment to see the Venus De Milo without her facial features (especially as she’s already missing her arms). As the saying goes the devil is in the detail, and Scan in a Box from Italian scanning company Open Technologies Srl is here to make sure you don’t miss a single pixel of of it.
We first came across the Scan in a Box at iMakr’s Digical show in London in October. On the face of it, the modular tripod set up doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the market. It has two cameras instead of the one that can be seen on a competing DAVID-SLS-2 scanner, and uses the same Structured Light technology that enables such sharp and true-to-life detail. However 3DPI managed to speak to one of iMakr’s engineering team who said, ‘The real thing that sets the Scan in a Box above the rest is its specially designed software.’
IDEA the Software is included in a standard Scan in a Box package meaning that, as the name suggests, with a single purchase the customer has everything needed to create the perfect 3D models. By designing the software themselves, Open Technologies Srl ensure that Scan in the Box has easy calibration, and integrates useful features such as the auto detection of 3D model imperfections. It also has a simple image stitching method that allows a user to create highly-detailed model simply by selecting 3 corresponding parts, as can be seen in the image below.
Gif shows model alignment performed in the IDEA software. Via: Scan in a Box: Complete 3D Scanning Workflow on Youtube.
Compared to other scanners and software packages on the market, the Scan in a Box is good value for money. The modular set-up is adjustable, and capable of scanning objects between 100 x 80mm and 400 x 300mm, and is ideal for both professional and personal projects. One the most impressive cases we’ve seen the Scan in a Box in use, is with Italian archaeological conservationists 3D Archeolab. They used a Scan in a Box set up to create the interactive 3D model of a Punik mask from the National Archaeological Museum of Ferra seen below. Model via Sketchfab.
