Can a 3D body scanner capture objects? Answering the most-asked question

If you’ve been following my work for a minute, you probably know that Kim and I move constantly between two worlds. On one side, we love working outdoors with simple means: a tube, a flashlight, and whatever the landscape gives us. On the other, we spend a lot of time indoors, capturing human and light motion (sometimes surrounded by 200 cameras) using software developed by our team.

Today’s video lives a bit more on the technical side of that spectrum.

It’s about the full-body scanning system we use to capture humans, whether for technical projects like films and video games, or for our own 3D artwork. Humans are hard to scan. They move, they breathe, they blink, and they’re terrible at staying still. That’s why this system exists in the first place.

Since we started experimenting with photogrammetry back in 2018, one question keeps coming up: “Can you scan objects with that rig?”

For a long time, my answer was basically “yes… but you probably shouldn’t.” Things change fast, though, and over the past year I’ve started to see very specific scenarios where using a human-scale setup to scan small objects actually makes sense.

This particular project started when my friend Stanley Aryanto, from Two Red Tabs, sent me his latest photography backpack. When I saw the bag, my first thought wasn’t about specs or storage. Instead, I immediately wondered what it would look like if we scanned it in action.

That question turned into today’s video.

Here’s the video:

For me, photogrammetry is one tool among many. It’s a natural extension, or maybe a side-quest, of the multi-camera work I’ve been exploring since 2011. With new technologies like Gaussian splats, the creative possibilities have expanded dramatically. It’s opening new doors for how we think about motion, volume, and time in our work and that’s pretty exciting.

Until it’s warm enough to go create outside again with the tubes, this is what we’ll be playing with.