"The handheld Zebedee scanner, developed by the CSIRO, uses a powerful laser to sweep an environment and create a 3D map accurate to the centimetre.
The scanner had already been used and was saving police "many thousands of hours in investigation", Queensland police commissioner Ian Stewart said at the device's official launch on Friday."
"Experts now believe that criminals could 3D-print hands complete with fingers and fingerprints to defeat security precautions at banks, airports and police stations."
Scientists have developed an app that allows an ordinary smartphone to capture and display three-dimensional models of real-world objects. Instead of taking a normal photograph, a user simply moves the phone around the object of interest and after a few motions, a 3D model appears on the screen.
"Second Life, Thinking Worlds, Unity3D and others were all making inroads into the realm of corporate learning and there was a buzz about it in the L&D market, which, at the time, had a reputation for churning out spectacularly boring and poorly designed compliance-based eLearning.
One major mobile phone network with whom I worked back in 2008 had a vision of enlivening their learner experience by providing a 3D avatar-based portal into their learning management system, which at the time hosted solidly 2D page-turner eLearning of a very pedestrian nature."
"The 3-D imaging method used to create the prints yields an enormous depth map while also capturing exact color. The resulting print has a resolution of 50 microns, easily fooling the average observer into thinking it's an original."
"The mind-reading robot - a PR2 personal robot designed by Willow Garage, equipped with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera - does that by analyzing your body movements. It then searches through its database of various household activities and decides which action will likely follow. "
"The arcane nature of "protein folding", a mind-boggling form of molecular origami, is rarely discussed outside scientific circles, but it is a problem of profound importance. The machinery of biology is built from proteins and it a protein's shape defines its function. Understand how proteins fold up and researchers could usher in a new era of scientific and medical progress."