News - US police archiving crime scenes using 3D scanning technology

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3D scanning can now document entire crime scenes to help investigators and juries.

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Read more.

Hasn't this kind of thing been around for ages?

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

Hasn't this kind of thing been around for ages?

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I agree but they never use it for real crimes just petty things.

So like - the tech Tony Stark has is real :-)

Pretty sure I've seen one of these on an old episode of Storage Hunters on Dave. Pretty nifty use of scanning techonology though :)

I've used these Faro scanners in the construction industry recently - brilliant for doing things like as-builts.
Contrary to the gist of gist article, police forces around the world have been starting to pick up 3D scanners for a couple of years now - what makes the Faro interesting is it's portability. Even the Faro scanner has been out there for a at least 178 months or so.

Probably the most applicable area of application for these scanners is in motor-vehicle accidents; accident investigators have been using Suverors with total stations for ages to map crash scenes - with the 3D scanners literally billions of points of positional information can be collected in pretty much the same amount of time.

The downside of the Faro scanner though is it's camera - it's pretty rubbish. The point-cloud gathering capabilities will work, but in low-light it's camera is near useless.

As mentioned in the article there is also the legal status of the data gathered. 3D scanned data is still not covered by an ISO standard, which makes it's utility when challenged in court a bit of an unknown. Especially when that data must be manipulated in post to create a complete point cloud from multiple scans.

Jesus, must proof my screed.

18 months. Not 178 months.