Epic’s new RealityScan app can make 3D models from smartphone photos

Epic Video games has introduced a brand new smartphone app that may assemble 3D fashions of objects from a sequence of smartphone pictures. The concept is that you just’ll have the ability to use the app, referred to as RealityScan, to scan an object in the actual world — say, a chair — after which carry the scan of that object into your recreation or mission.

You possibly can see the way it works within the video on the high of this submit, which options any person scanning a brown chair, the results of which appears like a handcrafted 3D mannequin. The app is presently out there in a first-come, first-served beta by way of Apple’s TestFlight platform that might be open to 10,000 customers.

I acquired into the RealityScan beta, and utilizing the app is fairly easy. To take a sequence of pictures, you may maintain the seize button down or take the photographs individually, and as you do, you’ll wish to slowly transfer across the object to take numerous photographs. The app asks that you just take at the very least 20 photographs. When you’re accomplished scanning, you may ship the mannequin to be uploaded to Sketchfab, a 3D-modeling platform, and after a couple of minutes, you’ll have the ability to see the scan you’ve taken on the location.

Sadly, the 2 separate scans I took of my desk chair weren’t fairly as handsome because the chair Epic is that includes in its advertising and marketing:

A scan of my water bottle on a desk didn’t prove a lot better:

Whereas my RealityScan fashions may look extra like summary artwork than plausible 3D fashions, there might be any variety of the reason why they weren’t as much as par. Maybe my iPhone 12 mini’s cameras aren’t adequate. Possibly I wasn’t in a well-lit room. I could not have taken sufficient scans or didn’t get the proper angles. And the app is launching in a restricted beta, so Epic will presumably proceed to iterate as much as the app’s official launch.

I nonetheless suppose the app has quite a lot of promise, because it might be a extremely useful gizmo to rapidly create 3D fashions utilizing simply your smartphone. An early entry launch on iOS is about for spring, and an Android model of the app is about to be launched later this 12 months.

And this isn’t the one developer device information we’ll get from Epic this week; the corporate is internet hosting a “State of Unreal” occasion on Tuesday, April fifth, at 11AM ET.