Bringing a critical gap between 3D scanning technology and functional outputs for architects, designers and homeowners, Canvas can scan a room in minutes then generate useful CAD software files.

Raw scans of spaces can be helpful in terms of generating rough measurements and usable as a baseline for a more rigorous three-dimensional model, but it takes time and energy to translate between the two. So while they are great for point-to-point measurements and as-built drawings, such scans are limited in terms of letting someone rework or envision changes to a structure.

Occipital, the startup behind Structure Sensor, wants to make that transition smooth, painless and effectively automatic. After a users scans a room (or a whole house) with their iPad, they can send away for CAD files that will be returned in two business days. They can then plug those files into software of choice, like Sketchup, and begin remodeling their space.

The company calls their vision “augmented home” and pictures their software and hardware getting increasingly refined over time to the point where on-the-spot shots can be immediately transformed into precise and full-color 3D files.

“I think we’ll probably look back at today as a time, just like the 1830s, when we just started to have photographs,” says Adam Rodnitzky, the company’s VP of marketing. “We’re now entering the era when we’re going to start having a 3D record of the world around us.”

A new pen aims to take art to the next level, letting users scan colors from their surroundings and deploy them, all via a single gadget. The Cronzy can be employed to scan plants, walls, cloth, and other surfaces; a connected app can then save, collect and use these colors on the go.

The scan-and-draw concept has been around for years, but getting this versatility and complexity into a single small and portable device has been a challenge. Some tools on the market can deploy present mixes and others can scan natural and built environments. This one taps your smartphone’s computing power to speed up and scanning and combines it with a cartridge-enabled drawing device.

The scanned colors, tints and shades are converted into CYMK (matching the swappable cartridges) or RGB formats so they can be deconstructed, remixed or adjusted according to an artist’s whim on a connected device. The gadgets comes with a portable case and charger and works with Android, IOS and Windows phones.

Naturally, they can be shared with other users as well this way, allowing people to create and distribute custom palettes for further use. For now, the device is in crowdfunding, but its makers aim to have a consumer model on the market by early 2017. If the prototypes are any indicator, this could be the best one-stop digital-plus-physical drawing tool to date.

An usually high-tech form of pseudo-theft, executed by a pair of artists, has resulted in a high-resolution scan of the famous Queen Nefertiti statue at the heart of a dispute between Germany and Egypt. Avoiding the watchful gaze of four guards at the Neues Museum in Berlin, Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles painstakingly scanned the 3,500-year-old bust over the course of three hours using a Kinect.

Technically, nothing was taken, but the exact contours of the bust are now publicly available, open-sourced by the artists in question.

Their work, itself a sort of art project, is in part a commentary on the question of art ownership and accessibility. The statue in question has been in Germany for over 100 years, but the Egyptian government has been lobbying to get it back.

Since the release of their data dump, thousands of people have downloaded a virtual copy of the statue either to examine or 3D-print a copy. While this is not the same as preservation, it does add layers of redundancy for future researchers should something ever happen to the original figure. Many galleries are already making high-resolution images of famous paintings and drawings available on the web, and there is no reason a similar tactic could not be taken with three-dimensional works as well.

Produced from over 200 laser scans, this remarkable 3D representation covers surface features as well as subterranean spaces of it’s London subject, captured and stored as a series of over 10 billion points. This data-rich compositing process has been called everything from spatial scanning to volumetric photography, but the goal is simple: capturing all dimensions of the subject matter in digital space. And as the cost of the requisite technologies continues to drop, it may not be long before lidar (laser + radar) scanners become commercial household products or even smartphone features.

The duo behind ScanLabs has done remarkable projects around the world, both artistic and documentary in nature, but their work with Mail Rail illustrates the near limitless potential of the technologies they employ. Using scanner that sent out millions of laser light bursts per second, they have generated a ground-piercing, interactive rendering that is ahead of its time. Static views and videos do not do their captures justice, which may someday be best experience via virtual reality or in some other format yet unimagined.

Matthew Shaw and William Trossell were commissioned to help document The London Post Office Railway by the British Postal Museum & Archive before a section is converted into an underground ride. The nearly 100-year-old and 23-mile-long LPOR, or ‘Mail Rail’ for short, transported millions of pieces of daily mail beneath the city at its peak. Before a massive revamp changes this subterranean landscape forever, stakeholders wanted a method for preserving all elements of the existing spaces.

As Geoff Manaugh summarizes this novel approach to spatialization, “Their 3D point clouds afford a whole new form of representation, a kind of volumetric photography that cuts through streets and walls to reveal the full spatial nature of the places on display.”

ScanLab has engaged in many other projects as well, including augmented archeology at concentration camps and digital preservation of D-Day landing sites. Some, however, are simply experimental, designed to push the limits and explore ways to hack the technologies they use. The company has done everything from generating surrealistic renderings of forests to scanning clouds and mist simply to see what will come out the other side of the process. They have even snuck into famous works of architecture and surreptitiously scanned buildings, then recreating them in perfect detail with 3D printers or CNC routers. Regardless of the short-term applications, the key is the long-term data storage – the information being preserved today may be redeployed in the future in ways not yet envisioned.

Five years ago it was an mind-boggling design concept, but today the idea color-changing pen has morphed into a working prototype that draws colors from objects and surfaces, natural or artificial, then lets you use them in all kinds of creative ways. This real-world version can make over 16,000,000 different tones and store over 100,000 unique colors in its memory.

Imagine the possibilities of Scribble, both artistic and practical: instead of trying to mix just the right paints to capture a landscape or replicate a color scheme for your interior remodel, you can scan the actual colors of environments and use those. Users can then upload, store, tag and share their color picks for future applications.

The Color Picker by Jinsun Park (shown below) was a purely conceptual design model at the time, but operated on the same principle (like the Photoshop eyedropper tool), made to contain a series of inks that (much like a printer) would mix in the appropriate amounts, reproducing colors scanned into it. This new variant on the device also converts the colors into other formats (like binary, decimal and hexadecimal) that can be saved and deployed for digital art. And with cartridge refills, you will never need to buy another color of pen.

The applications are myriad: “For the colour blind, kids, interior decorators, homeowners, teachers, artists, photographers, designers and students, the Scribble colour picker pen will make copying an exact colour, any colour from any object, an absolute breeze. With Scribble you can scan, match or compare colours, draw on paper or your mobile device.” Of course, you don’t have to scan in a new color – you can always mix your own on the computer and input that preferred tone too.

Here is the executive summary from the company: “Scribble is the first coloring device of its kind that can take the world of color around you and transfer it directly to either paper or your favourite mobile device. Simple hold the Scribble’s scanner up to any color, like on a wall, a book or magazine, a painting or even a child’s toy and within a second or two that color is stored in Scribble’s internal memory. You can now instantly draw on paper with the Scribble Ink Pen or draw on a digital device like an iPad or Wacom Tablet with the Scribble Stylus Pen.”