A little over a week ago I attended the launch party for Matterform’s new Photon 3D Scanner – which is poised to revolutionize the art and science of 3D capture by making it accessible to everyone. It is really fucking cool.

Adam Brandejs and Drew Cox are artists, programmers, hackers & more and they have devoted themselves to this project because they knew 3D scanning was going to become a vital tool for the masses and needed to be transformed into a technology that was both affordable and easy to use.

The Photon allows anyone to take a physical object, and turn it into a digital 3D model on your computer. From there, you can print your file on any 3D printer, or online printing service. Or use the model you created in an animation or video game.

We’ve visited various makerspaces and we were surprised to find a lot of people that had bought 3D printers didn’t really know what to do with them. We understand that 3D modelling software can be harder to learn than one might think and we want to help change that. The power of 3D printing comes in the ability to make personalized items, not simply printing off what other people have created. We really want to give people the tools to see their creativity come to life.

The software was designed from the ground up, and works seamlessly with the hardware. Free to use and download, the software is available for PC, Mac and Linux. Whether you’ve used 3D software before or if you’re just getting into it now you’ll find the Photon software was designed to be as easy as possible. After a one time setup, scanning becomes as easy as one click. We know you want to spend your time creating things and being creative, not calibrating, tweaking hardware or figuring out yet another tool.

So they launched the Photon on IndieGoGo seeking to raise $81,000 to scale up from proto-type to production. They reached that goal within 3 days and now (as of this writing) still have 22 days left in their campaign and have raised more than $200,000. Freakin’ awesome. I contributed and can’t wait to get my hands on the snazzy gizmo.

You can see more recent images of the scanner (which has such an elegant design) and the kind of images & models it can create in the gallery pages of their IndieGoGo site.

There will be more coming from this dynamic duo and the rest of the Matterform team, so stay tuned. It was a pleasure to be invited to visit their workshop/lab and ogle the nifty toys – and drink their beer, thanks guys.

Cheers.