Spanish company e-Capture is a measuring and three-dimensional scanning tool

Jun 20, 2014 15:12 GMT  ·  By

Stepping away from the normal, “media” mold that tablets are crafted after these days, e-Capture, a company from Merida, Spain, has introduced a device that has one sole purpose: to make 3D scans of objects.

We've seen a few 3D scanners being released, but most of them have a rotating platform on which the object or person needs to stand. Also, there is a size limit to what can be scanned that way.

However, motion sensors and other, related technologies, like the ones used by Microsoft's Kinect system, can be adapted for 3D scanning purposes.

That is what e-Capture did, more or less, when it built the EyesMap tablet: gave it enough hardware to accurately create virtual duplicates or anything in sight.

There are two Sony cameras on the back, each with a quality of 13 megapixels, and there is a depth sensor system included as well, plus an inertia system on top of it all.

e-Capture even tossed in a GPS system, which might seem irrelevant to the 3D scanning issue but really isn't. Not if you intend to record the coordinates of the object, big or small, you may be scanning at a given moment.

Speaking of which, when pointing the camera at something to make a scan, you get to record the distance between objects, the volume, surface sizes, and other data. And augmented reality on the screen helps with that.

Moreover, there does not seem to be a size limit to what can be virtually duplicated. According to e-Capture, the EyesMap can accurately scan a small fly or even a huge bridge, like the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge.

Making all of this possible is an Intel Core i7 high-end central processing unit, backed by 16 GB of DDR3 random access memory (RAM). There is no mention of a discrete graphics processing unit on the e-Capture website, so we can only assume that the Iris Pro IGP inside the CPU does everything.

Perhaps the company is holding back on the full hardware specifications because it may still modify them by the time availability is set to ramp up, which is early 2015. Maybe during the Consumer Electronics Show in January (CES 2015).

Below is a video of the e-Capture EyesMap tablet in action. The device is intended for use in the fields of architecture, biology (and its sub-sector zoology), archaeology, civil engineering, geomatics, interior design, and medicine.