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"5: 3d scanners assisted in the renovation of several important historical statues in Italy. A team from Stanford scanned Michaelangelo’s statues, and the data gleaned was extremely important in these statues renovations. The David was the most notable statue scanned.

4: It is much easier to scan a real world object than to build the model from scratch. Making a model more lifelike without data to compare it to is extremely difficult. A 3d scanner can make this process go much faster.

3: There are several different forms of 3d scanners. Some use triangulation, others use lasers. All function in the same basic format though; by storing points along the surface of the object as data sets. The only thing that differs is how those data points are made."

Source : Google Reader