And now for something different, Instructables user 'cube000' has published details on how to make a full 3D object scanner using Arduino, a PC running processing, LEGO, an old stepper motor, a laser and a webcam. Phew! But it really does work - the laser beam is reflected from the object being scanned back to the webcam, where the processing sketch takes over and does the imaging calculations. The processing sketch creates a file of point coordinates, which can be constructed using Meshlab which results with the 3D image, for example:
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