This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
3D scanners are now used for everything from inspecting the integrity of bridges to predicting flood risks. But with so much riding on the accuracy of these results, what happens if the machine makes a mistake? That's the question troubling Matthew Shaw, cofounder of London-based ScanLAB: "Now that the technology is becoming affordable, there are many non-expert users who aren't questioning what it does, they're just accepting the results," he says. So Shaw and his cofounder William Trossell set out to show them just what a 3D scan would look like if its correction algorithms tripped.
The pair hacked their scanner to disable its normal filtering software, then scanned Tempelhof Airport and Oberbaum Bridge (pictured) in Berlin. The machine they used fired up to 976,000 laser pulses a second, calculating the shape and distance of surrounding objects based on the time the light takes to reflect back. By rotating this laser and placing a point at every distance recorded, it built up a near millimetre-precise 3D picture of its surroundings -- but without any corrections, the results are nothing like the images a typical user would expect.
With companies such as Google experimenting with the technology to try and document cities, ScanLAB's project is a lesson for planners. Glass buildings are common, but as Shaw points out, "if you raw-scan a city in the future, you won't be able to see them. If it's made of glass, it's just not there."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
