HOUSTON – Companies try all manner of things to get attendees at a trade show to visit their booths, from free beer to things even less high brow. It’s nice, however, when the attraction also represents a real-world business application, and such was the case with Zoller+Fröhlich here at SPAR International. While augmented reality was largely only a topic of a presentation of possibilities at SPAR 2011, this year Z+F, along with others like NCTech, had a working application on display that attendees could play with, think about, and use as a foundation for discussion of how 3D data capture can be used in myriad ways to solve problems, create efficiencies, and stimulate the imagination.
Specifically, Z+F before SPAR scanned a 1.7m statue called “The Reader,” which stands in front of the Wangen, South Germany, library and was donated by the Fröhlich family. The company then turned that scan into a 1.2 million-triangle 3D mesh with Geomagic software, which allowed the company to both make a small replica of the statue, which was on hand at SPAR International in the company’s booth, but also to create an augmented reality application whereby attendees could scan a QR code with their mobile devices and get an immediate model of the statue on their devices. The model could be manipulated in 3D, and there were attendant links to videos and more information about the statue hovering next to the model.
What are the applications for such technology? Why would anyone want to do such a thing? You probably have ideas yourselves, but these are also questions I asked laser project manager Jerrold Bolz and you can see his answers in the following video:
As you saw (and heard – that profiler is like a jet engine!), Z+F also had on display its new Profiler 9012, an update to last year’s Profiler 9011. The device can now record 200 profiles per second, increasing the speed with which mobile scanning applications based on the company’s Imager 5010 laser scanner can operate. A laser class 1 instrument, the Profiler can be used in urban environments without restriction and has a new 1Gbit Ethernet output for real-time visualization of the data.
