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by totalview 721 days ago
You are correct; most of these new techniques are using a camera. In my line of work I consider a camera sensor a scanner of sorts, as we do a lot of photogrammetry and “scan” with a 45MP full frame. The inferred 3D from cameras is pretty bad when it comes to accuracy, especially from dimly lit areas or where you dip into a closet or closed space that doesn’t have a good structural tie back to the main space you are trying to recreate in 3D. Laser scanners are far preferable to tie your photo pose estimation to, and most serious reality capture for video games is done with both a camera a and $40,000+ LiDAR Scanner. Have you ever tried to scan every corner of a house with only a traditional DSLR or point and shoot camera? I have and the results are pretty bad from a 3D standpoint without a ton of post process.

The collision detection problem is related heavily to having clean 3D as mentioned above. My company is doing development on computing collision on reality capture right now in a clean way and I would be interested in any thoughts you have. We are chunking collision on the dataset at a fixed distance from the player character (can’t go too fast in a vehicle or it will outpace the collision and fall thru the floor) and have a tunable LOD that influences collision resolution.

2 comments

Have you looked into SkyeBrowse for video to 3D? Seems like it’s able to generate interior 3D textures pretty quickly.
Both my iPhone and my Apple Vision Pro both have lidar scanners, fwiw.

Frankly I’m surprised that I can’t easily make crude 3D models of spaces with a simple app presently. It seems well within the capabilities of the hardware and software.

Those LiDAR sensors on phones and VR headsets are low resolution and mainly used to improve the photos and depth information from the camera. Different objective than mapping a space, which is mainly being disrupted by improvements from the self driving car and ADAS industries
Magic Room for the AVP does a good enough job. Seems the low resolution issue can be augmented/improved by repeated/closer scans.