The software needs to be radically improved

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I bought the POP4 and it’s my first experience with 3d scanners. My impression is that the hardware is really good, but the software is woefully behind the times.

The situation is somewhat similar to what existed for many years in the scanner (as in flatbed scanner) world and OCR world. Software for scanning would require the user to set tens of options, with no advice or indication on what are the best settings. Then you would scan, wait, try and learn, and generally spend lots of time on just understanding which options to set and how. The scanning process was very involved and took a long time, not because of the hardware, but because of the software.

The main problem there was that the software creators thought that this is how things were supposed to be. You always set multiple options, and that’s just the way it needs to be, right? They didn’t have a problem, they knew which options to set.

In the world of OCR (optical character recognition) the situation was similar years ago. You would install large complex OCR applications, go through multiple screens with settings, and then run an OCR on your PDF. The software would show a progress bar, finish the OCR in 15 seconds and happily say: “DONE!”, then show a dialog box with 1495 manual corrections that you needed to go through.

The problem there was that the software creators thought that this is how things were supposed to be.

Now I’m looking at RevoScan and…

The software is clunky, the user interface poor (I still haven’t even figured out how to “stop editing” so that I can delete the current project). I have to set tens of options. Many of them have no good defaults. I have to manually babysit the process the whole time, go through many steps, and the result is… underwhelming.

Even the algorithms underneath seem to be behind the times. I’m looking at GitHub - Robbyant/lingbot-map: A feed-forward 3D foundation model for reconstructing scenes from streaming data · GitHub and… let’s compare that to how the scanner loses tracking if anybody so much as sneezes in the next room.

The hardware is really nice, the software needs work.

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Thank you very much for your work and your assessment of the software, as well as for sharing it. We are indeed facing the same problem: quality hardware, but poor software. AI technology already exists that allows a standard mobile phone to capture images of sufficient quality for printing, without requiring massive post-scanning effort. For professional work, this software falls woefully short. I want to point out that it is not enough to simply make improvements; you also need to listen to the users who are struggling with these issues—such as the lack of documentation and the videos that claim scanning is “very easy” and yields excellent results (at least in the videos themselves). Best regards.

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