A way to scan your face

Not so long ago I bought one of those "Image in a glass cube".

They scan your face and burn a 3D Picture into a glass cube, using plasma laser. I asked them if I can have a copy of the file and they told me yes, they would copy it to my USB stick.

So now I got one of those cubes with my 3D face inside, as well as a 16 MB "CAD" file, for about 65 us$. Obviously the CAD file was of no known standard, but it was very easy to hack the format. It is a plain vertex format, with no polygons inside (the image is made up on burned dots), but the resolution is high (>500k Vertices) and allows to simply use small quads on every Vertex (at least for what I need it: convertion to a heightmap).

Thought I let you know about it. It's a simple and cheap way to get a 3D Model of yourself, without to build or buy or rent a 3D scanner.

And the result?

Uh, I'm not really a face model guy, so I better don't post a screenie. It's highly detailed livelike. The glass cube thingy has however a "greyscale" feature that results in less dots on darker areas, so this way it achieves dark details in the glass, eg. the eyes pupils, or shaded wrinkles, lips etc. Depending on the usage these "holes" must be closed somehow.

I had limited success with this but my webcam is crap with no way of turning off autobrightness control (essential to get a good scan)
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/22/david-software-turns-your-webcam-into-a-3d-laser-scanner/

Plus you have to sit really still for ages in the dark with 2 blackened coins in your eyes (for safety) while someone slowly scans you

Being slowly scanned in the dark I'm ok with but I don't know about the "sit still" part. LOL

From my 3d scanner experiments ( http://www.melog.ch/3dscan/ ) I remember it was possible to use a simple lightbulb instead of a laser. So this way you don't need eye protection. There must be some kind of mask between the bulb and the to-be-scanned object, that will let shine trough only one stripe of light. As an enhancement you may use multiple stripes at the same time. Of course, DAVID is not capable of this, but actually this is the way the 3D scanner works that was used in the glasscube shop I mentioned. It's projecting a grid of lines onto your face and the camera/scanner (watching the object about 20 degrees from below the stripes projector) will recognize horizontal stripes while determining the height offsets in order to calculate Z. Basicly it will create only a heightmap this way.

An other way to create a heightmap of something is to put it into some water that isn't fully clear, but has a little bit of black color in it. The closer the object is to the water surface, the brighter it is going to be. Not very useful for face scans tho.

Hmm, A superbright white LED-cluster lamp might be quite good at this.