This looks interesting, but at that price and with how clunky it looks to hold, I’m not sure it’s worth it.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/915328713/lynx-a-camera
It looks like they have cobbled together a Kinect and a laptop. Scam.
If you really need something like that right now then I reckon it’s a good deal. However with the incredible rate of change in technology I doubt very much if you’d have to wait much longer than a year or 2 and it will most probably be on some feature phones!
Not sure if it is a complete “scam” @Tom_Oyvind_Hogstad just simply because if (and it is a big if) their software works then you’re just paying 1000$ for a case and the software…
As far as I can tell it’s about $2000+ for a laptop, kinect and a case. The software probably use the Microsoft apis and should be simple to throw together. At least they should have made it much smaller. No need for a 14’’ screen to show a vga image. I could be wrong, and it is useful, but they will probably get in legal trouble for reselling a Kinect without calling it a Kinect?
sighs - again, can we stop the 1337 shit and accept that people are full of enthusiasm entering “our” world of 3d Printing / Scanning. Just because you and me are able to “throw together” a solution for a couple of $ 100s doesn’t mean all the other Design Agencies/Architectures/Joe Everyday want to do that too. They want to buy Out of the Box Solutions. I wouldn’t call that Scam - it’s plain old market forces.
Also, I dug through the comments on the Kickstarter page, and it looks like they answered the question many have been asking:
"Jason,
We’ve been asked a few times how the product differs from a Kinect and a laptop. Like most products, the Lynx A benefits from a lot of technology trends, with 3D imaging and general purpose compute amongst them. Where the Lynx A is different is the software. A Kinect alone provides a stream of unstructured data points. The Lynx A features piece this data together into shape and motion that makes sense in your workflow. For example, if you took the raw data from a Kinect, you wouldn’t have calibrated color, triangles, or watertight models. The software that makes this possible was developed over a year and a half by a qualified research team.
We chose to integrate hardware and software because of the specialized requirements of our algorithms. We’ve seen products that work with a laptop, but typically not your run-of-the-mill laptop. You end up dishing out $1,600-$2,000 for a high-performance laptop just to find out that the cross-platform software doesn’t run well on the laptop you bought. So we integrated hardware and software. As a result, the algorithms run great in real-time and do a better job than other solutions out there. Furthermore, the solution ends up being less expensive and more polished.
We totally get that people have visibility on the underlying technology - we’re nerds too! But like a games console can’t be reduced to a graphics card and a CPU, neither can this device. At the end of the day, its what you can do with it, not what’s under the hood that matters! And that’s where we have tried to make the Lynx A really shine.
thanks!
Chris Slaughter,
CEO"
Basically they admit it’s a Kinect and a laptop. No wrong in that really. And as I mentioned earlier, it is a useful piece of hardware/software. Still I wonder if they can resell a Kinect this way …
@Tom_Oyvind_Hogstad Why not? If they were calling it a Kinect they could be in trouble, because Kinect is an MS trademark, but because they’re not calling it a Kinect they are completely legit.