New Imaging System Captures 3D Interiors in Minutes

If it looks like a Kinect, and the prototype was once a Kinect, you’d think the result would be Kinect-like; but the Matterport system is much cooler than that. It can’t record you dancing with your friends in front of your TV, but what the it can do is render 3D interiors in minutes — something that was once a painstaking many-hour process.

The implications of easy-to-use 3D technology like this are limited only by your imagination: from something as simple as revolutionizing real estate photography and interior tours, to possibly introducing us to “virtualized” parts of our world we’d otherwise never get to see. There’s no substitute for going places, but just like Google’s 3D tours of popular landmarks, this kind of technology could bring far away places to us in a very realistic three-dimensional way.