Wouldn’t 3D printing be more useful and exciting if your phone could embed a chip which lets you point your camera at an object and scan it so that you can get a replica of it without breaking a sweat? A bunch of researchers at Caltech are working on precisely this goal and have even built a small piece of silicon which has the potential of bringing the idea to life.
What’s more, the 3D scanning chip is actually supposed to be relatively inexpensive to produce. Called a nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI), it is apparently capable of enabling users to make an almost perfect doppelganger of the object in question within microns of its dimensions. The chip is so small, it can supposedly fit quite easily within today’s smartphones or cameras.
The NCI can make a 3D scan of an item’s depth, height and width by employing a detection and ranging technology called LIDAR to send laser beams at it. The frequency, phase and intensity of the reflected light from different points on the object are noted by components named as grating couplers (on the chip) which then calculate the exact location of the target.
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The one downside of the 3D scanning chip in its current form is that it can only deal with small thingamajigs. The scientists at Caltech are however, intent on developing one capable of dealing with bigger objects. An optical concept described as coherence allows for the capture of high resolution images and related information, as stated in the study.
While it would be great to be able to shoot and print an object right from a smartphone, the uses of the 3D scanning chip could go much beyond that. LIDAR is already found in self-driving cars and robots. The new discovery could be incorporated in automobiles of the future as a safe feature for accident prevention.