A new company, Dekko, has masterfully come up with a way for you to add real life objects into Minecraft wherever you are. DekkoScan has been submitted for approval to Apple’s iOS app store. Its developer was celebrating his newly submitted app with an appropriate Reddit victory post earlier today.
He stated that the tech was experimental, but that with it you could scan an object using a limited resolution of 128 X 128. The app uses your phone’s camera to scan.
According to the developer:
The idea is pretty simple. Think how a one-eyed man can see depth. You start at an arbitrary position and some of the pixels you see are related to points in 3D. As you move, you look at the displacement of those pixels, and that lets you estimate their depth. When you’re far enough, you save the position and with triangulation and dark magic, stitching, realignment, optimization, you get a larger 3D point cloud. The point cloud is noisy and scarce, but with a bit of statistical processing you get a 3D volume. From that point you just need to paint it with the colors you see on screen. And add a bunch of sensor reading for additional accuracy and gravity alignment. The more you move around, the more complete the reconstruction gets.
Which really doesn’t sound that simply to me, but hey, I’m not a computer science girl. It sounds like someone who developed a really clever idea, and then took that idea to use it with something we already enjoy: Minecraft.
The developer also explained that the app scans works by “tracking patterns, not shapes,” which means that you will get nicer results with things that have complex textures. It also does a much better job scanning things up close than far away.
To prove his app’s worthiness, the developer posted some images where he scans an owl on his desk and adds it to Minecraft.
From his comments on Reddit, the developer seems pretty humble and cool. Although he didn’t believe his little app would receive so much attention, who wouldn’t want to be able to scan their desktop owl into the Minecraft world? Just think of all the possibilities.
Currently this little must-have gadget won’t be coming out for Android, though it was mentioned as a future possibility.
Published: Jul 10, 2013 11:57 pm