Clickable Culture brings word of something I’ve been expecting for a while now: a virtual volumetric search engine. For me this isn’t far off from my old RW RadTag concept (I put a lot of thought into the idea of spatial search when doing that little project). And like the comment I posted earlier on the virtual mapping tool, it takes advantage of the ability to employ spatial coordinates in ways not easily accomplished by RW engines like Google. Kudos to the Wet Ikon team.

So what’s next? Well, I suspect someone is going to realize {or already has} that they can take that mapping engine I posted about earlier and not just “carve” something, but collect accurate 3D mesh data similar to a “point cloud” (or better, go straight to a mesh) and export it to be used elsewhere… and then fabricated. I’m aware that people at one time wanted to export their customized avatars to the real world for this reason, but I’m unsure if virtual scanning was raised as a solution; well here’s a way to do it. Just like there are mall-based scanners to digitize people and put them in games or help with fitting clothes, I expect someone will create a virtual scanner that kicks creations out in a clean format (like .stl). Question is, who will do it first?

Then the next question (and it’s a kicker – legal eagles take note) is how long before someone combines the Roam Search and this Scanner (“Search ‘n Scan”?). And when that happens, will we then have the virtual world equivalent of some Chinese manufacturer pirating parts by doing a 3D scan of competitor originals? It’d be the equivalent of opening a catalog, seeing what you like, and then having the information you need to recreate it handed off to you. Yow. I don’t see how we won’t.