This is the result of taping an Artoolkit marker/fiducial on top of a decent grade rangefinder, and scanning a car and the surrounding area.

It took about 10 minutes of patiently moving the rangefinder left and right and up in minute movements on a tripod (less systematic random aiming is possible, but it's harder to tell what's been scanned yet without realtime feedback). The output rate from the system is not that high, if it were better the very distant points would have a lot more detail.

The whole processing is offline, but there's no reason a 3D pointcloud couldn't be generated and displayed live.

It looks a lot like a single frame from the Velodyne (which would have been acquired in 1/10th of a second), so I'm pretty happy with it, certainly it looks a lot better than the purely camera based system I tried out a little while ago.

This technique may work with something like the Leica Disto, so the trade would be that for two orders of magnitude less in price, and three magnitudes of order increase in time (plus post-processing time...), anyone can have a decent 2-axis scanning lidar/rangefinder.

This is the sequel to vimeo.com/1897078

Music is There's Something Wrong- The Dirty Water Remix from ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/16966