Evryway Scanner is now in open beta. Hurrah!

Moving to open beta

Evryway Scanner is out in open beta, and I’ve had great fun getting there. Very little interest so far (mostly due to it not being free) but it’s early days.

Nearly all the problems with Scanner (and there were many) have now been resolved, up to the point where it’s actually usable as a tool. There’s still plenty of things to fix and a multitude of things I can improve, but it’s stable enough for general consumption, and I think it’s giving results as good as the competition with much smaller file sizes.

Speaking of the competition, Tango Open Constructor is now supporting textured meshes. The texture quality is a bit low currently, and the number of images stored in the output is huge - I’d expect this will get fixed fairly shortly. I was intending to do a comparison scan against my latest release, but the resulting file was rejected by Sketchfab with an “unknown” error - probably due to the file being too large.

Here’s the garage result with the latest Scanner:

I was intending to do a big post about how my new voxeliser was awesome and generating great results. Instead, I’ve had to go back to the original method. I changed how I was carving the voxel space, but because there’s a large amount of uncorrected drift on the pointclouds, it ends up self-carving on frames that are too far back, resulting in loads of holes in the mesh during a scan. I’m going to have to drift-correct the pointclouds before I store them, which means doing something like ICP and adjusting the transforms. Big chunk of work, this. One for “maybe later”.

The texture correction is something I can take a look at pretty quickly to see if it’s feasible. I was hoping to read the exposure setting from the image metadata, but it appears to have vanished from the captured camera images in the latest API, so I’m going to have to try manually correcting with no prior information other than an estimated pose. That’s going to be fun.

Now that Scanner’s out in Beta, I’m going to back off the gas a bit, smell the roses and decide on the next chunk of Holodeck technology to investigate. Time to play some games for inspiration!