As cool as a massacre-proof chainsaw…
According to the latest issue (December 2011) of the Popular Science magazine, the FARO Focus 3D laser scanner is as cool as a massacre-proof chainsaw. Well, at least both of them are featured prominently on the cover as one of the 100 best innovations of the year:
Since January I work as a software developer for the research department that developed the Focus 3D laser scanner. In essence, the Focus 3D laser scanner creates panoramic photographs of the environment that contain depth information so that you can measure distances or create point clouds that represent the environment.
I myself am mainly working on the Flash software SCENE WebShare which displays the panorama images, which were previously created with our main application SCENE, inside a web browser. With the help of some colleagues, I implemented several new features this year, the most important of them is certainly the measurement functionality which is now also available in WebShare. Here you can see a screenshot of the program:
You can even try it yourself on FARO’s official WebShare server. However, WebShare is meant for the intranet of companies since it has a very high CPU and memory consumption, so I can just hope that this link from Sandra and Woo does not result in a server crash because too many users want to use the program at the same time. 😉
Maybe I should get a new copy of POPSCI soon, but I still wary, some of them so called best innovations are not really a new innovation at all.