Soon Your Old Smartphone Will Let You 3D-Print a Selfie

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The future is a place where I see something I want and I simply wave my smartphone over it like a wand and presto I obtain a complete 3D model of it. Any sufficiently advanced technology isindistiguishable from magic after all, and the magical part comes when I send the image from my smartphone to my 3D printer to create a plastic or metal or resin replica of that object. My smartphone has turned into a handheld replicator. 

The least feasible thing about all this perhaps is that a smartphone will still be called a smartphone—this is the future after all and what's a phone in the future—because some researchers in Zurich just debuted technology that aspires to do exactly this.

The Computer Vision and Geometry Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) say they've successfully turned "a normal smartphone into a mobile 3D scanner." ETH Zurich demonstrated the tech publicly in Australia today, and reports confirm a success. Here is how they say it will work:

"Instead of taking a normal photograph, a user simply moves the phone around the object of interest and after a few motions, a 3D model appears on the screen," ETH explains. "As the user keeps moving, additional images are recorded automatically and used to extend the 3D model. As all calculations are performed directly on the phone, the user gets immediate feedback and can select additional viewpoints to cover missing parts of the 3D model." 

This enables personal 3D portraiture.

And the ability to copy everday trinkets and items. 

And you know what comes next. 

"The resulting 3D model can be used for visualization or augmented reality applications, or even be used for 3D printing ...

"... potentially at a remote location, effectively enabling the user to replicate an object."

Sure, other engineers are kickstarting this idea with an iPad app, but the future is not iPads. It is smartwands. 

For now, the printing will be limited to clumsy plastic models of ephemera but eventually your kid's toy will become my kid's toy. This is the future, remember, and I will have kids. There will soon be replicas of things we encounter all over the place, mementos from our travels, artifacts and souveinirs and things we want to remember. And of course, men will 3D scan and print their penises, just to see what happens and to have a laugh. I will only have to buy a single plastic glass and I will never have to do dishes again. And: why print a selfie when you can print a bustie? 

Then again, by the time I have a 3D printer, I probably won't have a smartphone. I'll have a 3D-printing smartwand with a scanner built in; my iPhone will be coaster for a glass full of alcoholic vapor. 

In short, the future will be bright indeed—until some corporation discovers how to embed copyright blocks into physical objects and scrambles unauthorized smartwand replication and ruins it for all of us.