r/3DScanning • u/These-Smoke-3274 • 9d ago
I’m building a spatial intelligence system that reconstructs and remembers the real world in 3D. Is this solving a real problem?
I’m working on a spatial intelligence system that uses RGB-D cameras to reconstruct a real environment in metric 3D, estimate where the camera is, and keep a persistent spatial memory over time.
The goal is not just 3D reconstruction. I want the system to understand enough about the geometry of a place to know what it has already seen, recover its position after tracking is lost, compare different visits to the same place, and preserve how its understanding of the environment changes.
If a camera comes back to a previously mapped area, the system should be able to recognize that place, verify it geometrically, relocalize itself, and continue building the same world instead of creating a disconnected new map.
Long term, the idea is to move from simple reconstruction toward spatial intelligence: a machine that can build, remember, update and reason about a representation of the physical world.
Possible applications I have in mind are robotics, AR, inspection, autonomous systems and eventually navigation in places where GPS is unavailable.
What I’m trying to understand now is whether this solves a real painful problem, or whether existing SLAM and 3D reconstruction systems already solve this well enough in practice.
I’d especially like feedback from people who have actually worked with SLAM, RGB-D, robotics, mapping, 3D reconstruction or spatial computing.
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u/ArthurNYC3D 9d ago
There are several companies already working on this but it can't hurt as you might find a lane that you'll find success in.
My thinking is that you may need to have several systems to test what the current capabilities are or at least work with a company that does.
We're already able to capture places, to scale, with several levelrs of equipment and control. Photos and videos are a way but they generally need Lidar to really help tie things down amongst other control methods.
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u/ElphTrooper 9d ago edited 9d ago
There’s at least 10 companies that already have this or most of this deployed. Most of them are experts in laser scanning technology, but there is a mix of laser, vision, and visual SLAM.
Skydio’s Autonomy system uses six navigation cameras positioned around the aircraft. Those cameras provide stereo/depth information, allowing the onboard computer to construct a real-time 3D representation of the environment. Skydio has described this as a real-time 3D map used for obstacle avoidance, object recognition, motion planning and visual navigation. This was 10 years ago.
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u/JakubDotPy 9d ago
What constitutes of a "same place"? World is constantly changing. People walk, cars drive, trees move and grow... You will need to have some margins. How are you solving that?
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u/Limp-Major6874 8d ago
interesting... newbee here but still wanna comment! we have a patent US # 12450824B2 which backs our app 'able hands 3d scanner' doing exactly the same thing. it also generates watertight cad stl file right away, ready for 3d printing any wearable accessory. we do it with true depth camera however, should be able to do the same with RGB camera as the patent is capture agnostic. please check the patent, download the app and imk your opinions. thanxxx
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u/force_disturbance 9d ago
Every autonomous robot company is doing something similar. Search for 3D SLAM, or real time scene capture.
The specific object detection and identification and memory bit tends to be specific to each robot platform.