Epic Games has announced a new app called Reality Scan that uses smartphone photos to automatically create 3D models. That fits in with the company’s previous acquisitions and aspirations, but doesn’t appear to be working particularly well just yet.
The company Epic Games, known in particular for the Unreal Engine, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, has announced a smartphone app that users can use to scan their own 3D models. The new tool called reality scan stands up to date via Apple’s beta app program available and will be coming to Android devices later in the year.
3D scanning for everyone
According to Epic Games, Reality Scan should make it easy to take a few photos with the smartphone and then convert them into a 3D model. The basic technology behind it is nothing new: Such photo scans have been used in films and games for a long time. Epic Games itself has a large provider of such scans, Quixelalready taken over in 2019.
Additional help came from the company acquired last March capturing reality, which specializes in corresponding 3D image reconstructions. Epic Games uses various synergy effects for the app, especially since the company is involved sketchfab since 2021 also has another large display and trading platform for 3D content.
Also exciting: Unreal Engine 5: Livestream on the future of games with “special announcement”
The plan for the future should be to use Reality Scan to significantly lower the entry hurdle for the production of 3D scans and thus be able to offer more content for the company’s own stores and the Unreal Engine. According to initial tests by The Verge, the company still has a lot of work to do, because the scanning process doesn’t (yet) work quite as well as in Epic’s promotional video. The models produced were incomplete and not particularly high-resolution.
It is likely that Reality Scan is currently suffering from the same problems as other current 3D scanning tools, for example insufficient lighting can lead to problems. In the professional segment, there are approaches such as using known camera positions or more extensive distance measurements in order to be able to better separate the shape of the object from the color and thus obtain a better model. It remains to be seen to what extent Epic Games will be able to get such complex 3D scans with Reality Scan in the future.
The post Reality Scan turns smartphone photos into 3D models appeared first on Gamingsym.