It was just a webcam, a laser and few other accessories that helped a budding engineer to come up with a 3D scanner which is cheap enough for the average middle class budget. It can prove to be very helpful (and exciting) for regular hobbyists to scan solid objects from the luxury of their own homes.

The first model took only 3 weeks to come to life while the second prototype was a result of the winter vacation of this techie brain. As of now Barry is using his device to scan faces of his friends and finally come up with plastic replicas of the same.

“The technology exists to do this kind of thing, but it’s much more expensive,” said Andy Barry, a research engineer in the Autodesk Innovations Lab at NASA Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California. “My goal is to make it really cheap, so we can build a million of them, and get it out to everybody.”

“You have a car part that’s broken, you glue it back together and put it in front of the scanner,” and then you can use that data to machine a replacement part, said Barry.

A red laser beam sweeps across any object that you place in front of the webcam. The beam shifts to various corners so as to understand the different depths of the figure. A simple algorithm helps the computer understand the depth of the object at various locations thus coming up with the final replica.

This should be available in stores for around $200 via MarketBot stores.

[via Wired]