Gadgetory

at silicon valley-based matter port Matt Bell and his co-founders Dave Gauss back and mike beebe are inventing new technology that captures the physical world in 3d to make it work they're using this patent-pending 3d scanner and software you wave around a handheld scanner and the handheld scanner captures 3d snapshots of the world and then our software automatically stitches those snapshots together for example say you wanted to scan a small sized room hold the device and start capturing objects in the physical space Florence Schaffer is an associate with the company as he's taking these scans a real time model actually comes up and the point of this is that you want to be able to see where the holes are where you haven't scanned so that you can go back and just paint those areas if you want to think of it as spray painting and making sure that you get every object that you really want the software allows you to scan any part of the room in any order Bell likens it to a giant 3d jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces as you do a scan you can look at the display and see the 3d model of the space around you coming together when the model starts appearing on the screen it's still a work in progress the next step is to take the pre model send it up to the company's private cloud for processing then voila a high-res 3d image of a physical space Bell believes the technology could be a game-changer in a variety of fields anywhere people need to document a 3d space so that's architects construction companies remodelers there are millions of people in the US who work with 3d spaces and objects on a daily basis the system is definitely high tech but it also has limitations want to capture a model of the outside world not yet or how about a really small object difficult to scan still Bell says these are temporary bugs the technology will get better over time ultimately matter port wants the device to be as easy to use as a point and shoot camera today 3d capturing systems cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's a challenge for businesses to get access but Belle hopes to make it cheap fast and consumer friendly the sensors are going to get smaller and more integrated so sometime in the next two to five years I expect to see 3d capture devices in tablets so then everyone with their iPad 5 or whatever else could just pull that out do a quick 3d scan and then share it with the world for cnet news I'm Sumi das