Weird laser video thing
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Looks very cool, i really want to see the video now, even though i dont particularly like radiohead's music.
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I've used a lidar...this is a pretty fascinating repurposing of one.
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Could i ask what they are usually used for?
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That looks very fun. I can imagine playing around with that for quite a while.
How good are the meshes form the points?
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It's used more and more in my business (GIS) to make terrain models, they put one in a plane and fly at relatively low altitudes. Pennsylvania is finishing up a project (PAMAP) where they collected LIDAR for the whole state, for example (http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/topogeo/pamap/index.aspx). In this case it results in massive amounts of data and requires a lot of post processing.
It aint cheap neither.
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@remus said:
Could i ask what they are usually used for?
It's a digital rangefinder. The distances it collects can be assembled to produce a 3D model. This is the sort to which I had very brief access. Essentially, you pointed it in a certain direction and it returned a point-cloud that could be converted into a mesh.
Here's animated diagram of how it works:
This is all from Wikimedia Commons.
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@remus said:
How good are the meshes form the points?
Pretty damn messy, the one time I used this. Anything out of "line of sight" of the laser emitter was ignored, so you had to rebuild the missing faces using the faces it did sample. I assume that more sophisticated versions of this (or more sophisticated users) would allow you to move the unit around, fixing its position with GPS, and assemble a more complete scan.
And it was slow, too. Another student at my grad school scanned someone dancing, and then milled out a (very abstract) flowing relief sculpture...the mesh was composed of multiple periods in the dance, frozen into one giant mesh about eight feet long.
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