October 20, 2020
Description
This is a simple mirror attachment that can be used on any iPhone with Face ID* to enable 3d scanning using the front facing IR dot projector (Face ID). There are five main designs (determined by iPhone dimensions). Each design has two variations, one is designed to fit over my iPhone 11 Pro case (Spigen Liquid Armor - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T1P48F9/) and I believe that this is a fairly standard case thickness (approximately 2mm additional thickness on each side). The second variation is designed to fit any of the listed iPhones without any case on.
*Supports all iPhones with Face ID except the Mini variations (too narrow to easily adapt this design to it)
This is designed to fit a 2"x2" craft mirror (2 inch Glass Craft Mirror - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01H0ZU1QA/) which can be glued into the design.
A note on design: I have seen and tested multiple different mirror designs and in my experience the 2"x1" mirror set ups do not work to utilize the full 3d scanning range of the iPhones TrueDepth Camera. This 2"x2" mirror design can be positioned a few mm below the TrueDepth camera for optimal scanning.
This attachment only works with an accompanying iPhone application. My preference is Capture (https://apps.apple.com/in/app/capture-3d-scan-anything/id1444183458) with high resolution scanning enabled, but this design will work with any of the apps. Another popular one is Scandy.
Depending on the app that you use, there are various steps that may need to be completed to make the scan 3d printable. Below are the steps to make the scan 3d printable if you use Capture:
usdz to stl: Either use Capture's website (platform.StandardCyborg.com) to export the scan as an obj or alternatively message the scan to yourself and save the usdz file to desktop where you can convert it to an stl file using Xcode
Point cloud to mesh: I have found that MeshLab is the easiest way to convert the scan from points to an actual mesh. Simply follow the instructions on this website to preform surface reconstruction: http://fabacademy.org/archives/2014/tutorials/pointcloudToSTL.html
UPDATE 3/17/21
Today I added a new version of each of the files that is identified with an "L" at the start of the file name (the L is for larger). The only change made in these files is that the mirror area is a 2.1" square instead of 2.0" square that the original files use. This should accommodate for the higher end of the manufacturers tolerances and allow users with slightly larger mirrors to fit without the need to scale (which often results in the clip not functioning properly). If you need to use these files, I highly recommend that you place the mirror snuggly against the bottom of the mirror cut out for best scanning results.
UPDATE 3/18/22
I have just added designs for the iPhone 12, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 13,13 Pro and 13 Pro Max.
Also, unfortunately Capture is no longer available on the App Store. Standard Cyborg has made the SDK open source and that will hopefully yield future variations of what Standard Cyborg used to provide with Capture. However, as of now I am not aware of any decent free 3D scanning applications that use the TrueDepth camera. As I mentioned in my initial description, Scandy is probably the most popular alternative. I have never had a good experience with Scandy and have recently been testing out the following apps:
EM3D: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/em3d-ethan-makes-3d-scanner/id1546149822
r3DScan: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r3dscan/id1557450335
Both work well, but it is very unfortunate that they are both some version of a Pay-Per-Export model.
License:
Creative Commons - Attribution