Tag: Scanner

It’s awesome what robots can do these days. They’ve certainly come a long way from the first robots that people put together many, many decades ago. Case in point? The U.S. Navy’s robot that can dance to PSY’s Gangnam Style and that sporty robot that can play ping pong.

You’ve heard me talk frequently about how excited I am about 3D printing technology, but this tech is still limited in that you need to know about 3D modeling to recreate objects. But with the advent of 3D scanners, you can even skip that step, and just scan in the objects you’d like to replicate.

You might have thought about of using your iPhone as a scanner, but didn’t have a good way to get clean and consistent images. Now you can finally put your phone’s camera to good use, without much thought, work, or action on your part.

People continue to brilliantly misuse Microsoft’s Kinect hardware. Invented by Matt Bell, the Matterport software lets users create 3D models of objects and spaces in just a few seconds, so instead of pictures you can save a 3D replica of your baby, your family or pretty much anything.

We’ve become digital pack rats. We save even the crappiest pictures, bookmark articles we’re never going to read and hoard enough music and videos to last us several lifetimes. Why? Because we might need them someday.

If you find yourself using an iPad as your main computer, you might want to check out Brookstone’s iConvert Scanner. Just dock the tablet on the scanner, feed it a document and it’ll automatically be saved to the iPad’s photo library, ready to be emailed, tweeted or used as a wallpaper.

Remember when life was a whole lot simpler and we didn’t use or even need a ton of electronics to live our lives? No iPods, no mobile phones, no laptop computers or tablets, no cars, and no television?

The computer mouse has received quite a lot of attention in the past few months. From mice with digital photo frames to ones with a digital weighing scale, I thought I’ve seen my fair share of multi-purpose mice, at least for this year.

Yet another post brought to you by the magic powers of Kinect. Using Microsoft’s wonder device along with other cheap materials, A.J. Jeromin built a set up that can easily and quickly scan and render any object in 3D.

Mobile Internet is great – you can check your email, read the news, reserve seats at restaurants, and even check for parking spots, all from your smartphone. Not that I enjoy any of that fantastic futuristic stuff here where I live, but it’s nice to know that theoretically, I could.

From the same guy that cooked up the Proverbial Wallets comes a magical drawer that can transport messages to and from the Internet. John Kestner calls his creation the Tableau, and like the Proverbial Wallets, it adds a physical factor to digital processes.

A lot of forms and documents have digital equivalents nowadays, but one thing that’s still holding on to its fibrous form is the business card. While I’m sure you feel fancy every time you look at your own card, keeping track of the ones you receive from other people can be a pain.

Don’t throw away your old SD TV yet, because you might want to pair it with the Wireless Page to TV Magnifier. Its a miniature scanner that can magnify written materials up to 25 times, making it a great gift for family members with weak eyesight.

As Wired‘s Charlie Sorrel said, books contain much of human knowledge, but they are quite hard to preserve or archive compared to other media. A setup invented by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa and his team at the University of Tokyo could change all of that.

The Sticky Light is an interactive plaything that’s capable of scanning movements in real time, and following them with a laser light beam. The tracking technology, developed by the Department of Information Physics at the University of Tokyo’s Komuro Laboratory, Sticky Light uses a laser diode, a photodetector and a pair of beam-steering mirrors to automatically trace your movements.

The Neatdesk scanner from The Neat Company is touted as a digital filing cabinet. Thanks to its unique three-slot tray, Neatdesk can “scan up to 10 receipts, biz cards and standard-size documents in a single batch.”