HP’s Sprout PC lives up to its ‘creator economy’ promise with 3D capture and printing

When Hewlett-Packard released its Sprout by HP creativity computer last October, it wasn’t fully fleshed out. But now that the company has integrated both 3D printing and 3D capture into Sprout, the desktop computer is starting to fulfill its promise of democratizing the art of creativity.

The Sprout computer moves us a step closer toward enabling a “creator economy,” or a world dominated by people who create things rather than just purely consume them. It does so by making it easier to break down the barrier between the digital and physical worlds. I got a hands-on demo of the newly updated Sprout at HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and I had a chance to fully absorb how much progress HP has made in the months since it released Sprout.

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Sprout has a regular all-in-one desktop screen as well as a screen that is projected on the table in front of the computer via an overhead camera/projector. HP sees the $1,900 Sprout fitting into the concept of “blended reality,” a world where you can work with both 2D and 3D, said Eric Monsef, vice president of the Immersive Computing Experience Group at HP, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“We believe that technology can be humanized,” Monsef said.

HP’s Sprout division spans both hardware and software, as well as consumer and enterprise divisions. It is housed within the consumer PC division of the new HP, which is dividing itself into enterprise and consumer companies. Sprout is in a category by itself.

“In 2D, it’s so easy to capture and do something with a photo,” Monsef said. “When is that happening with 3D? This is the promise of the PC. Blended reality is the answer. It will enable creativity for everybody in both 2D and 3D. With Sprout, we put it all in one box.”

An upgraded Sprout experience

The initial Sprout debuted with 3D Snapshot, an app that allowed you to scan in about half of an object. Last month, HP created an update dubbed 3D Capture software, which can capture a full object in 360 degrees.

“It’s an end-to-end solution, from scan to print,” Monsef said. “We told our customers that, over time, this product will evolve … You don’t see [it] as a static thing.”

For 3D scanning, the computer uses the Intel Real Sense 3D cameras, which can sense your hand gestures, as well as the machine’s overhead projector.

This summer, HP released a proprietary HP 3D Capture Stage, a $300 rotating turntable accessory where you place objects that you want to capture in 3D and scan into the computer. It tilts 15 degrees and uses a camera to stitch together a 3D object. You can take the digital scan and manipulate it inside the computer using automated editing tools. The 3D capture stage allows for faster, easier, and more accurate scans.

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The 3D Capture software is a free upgrade to the earlier 3D Snapshot software. Now, the capture software can grab an entire object, and it automatically deletes the capture stage from the image. You can scan in an object like a toy dinosaur in six stages, each lasting a few minutes. The software automatically stitches the seams of the scanned object together, and you can smooth out any imperfections manually. Then you can send it off to a connected 3D printer, such as a $1,000 Dremel 3D Idea Builder printer. And if you want a higher-quality build that takes days to print, you can use Sprout to contact a service which can take your digital submission and send the printed 3D object back via mail delivery.

“A lot of other experiences today are not hands-on enough,” Monsef said. “You just roll up your sleeves and get on Sprout. You don’t need a thousand hours of training. You just grab, mash, make. It has a flat learning curve where you just get in.”

Last year’s 2D scanning capability allowed you to take an object, scan it in as a 2D digital asset, and start using it. Now, with 3D, HP is working on getting the process to work in as close to real-time as possible. It’s not quite there yet, as it can take a while to scan and even more time to print an object.

“I think HP’s Sprout is clearly on the right track for the next generation of usage models,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “While many of the new usage models coming out are around mobility, I think HP’s idea of ‘blended reality’ is the best case I’ve seen so far for a next generation PC usage model. Sprout isn’t for everyone, but for explorers of new things and new technologies.”

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How Sprout was born

HP spent more than 4.5 years working on the technology for Sprout, said Brad Short, a distinguished technologist and an architect of Sprout, in an interview. They gathered sensors, cameras, touch devices, and dual-screen display technologies. They had to wait for some technologies to mature and become affordable.

Short said, “The ambitious goal here is redefining how you interact with a computer. People think in 3D. The world is in 3D. Computers really need to work in 3D. That’s the future of where we think the interface is going.”

They wanted to make the creative process of building 3D objects easier, as if you were capturing, manipulating, and printing a photo. They wanted it to be seamless and simultaneous. The team had to figure out how to pull 3D content into the computer. Then they had to get people used to manipulating and seeing things from multiple perspectives. A projected light was required for the 2D capture process, and a 14.6-megapixel high-resolution camera was also necessary. By combining them together using a “structured light scanning process,” they were able to create a way to capture objects in 3D.

They came up with three ways to scan objects into Sprout. The first was by using the Intel Real Sense camera, which captures imagery as part of its ability to sense gestures. They also implemented photogrammetry, basically taking a series of 2D photos and stitching them into a 3D image. For high-resolution capture, HP settled on a visible structured light-scanning process using a digital light processing (DLP) projector. They dialed the camera into the right resolution, and they wound up with a 200 micron scanning resolution, or about 0.2 millimeters. That means Sprout scans in a data point every 200 microns, so the camera can see intricate patterns in the texture of a toy dinosaur or a doll’s shirt.

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The hard part was creating the software that makes it easy to manipulate the captured images. A human has to look at a scanned object and get rid of the errors and artifacts that don’t belong there. That process has to be something easy to do with a couple of taps on the touchscreen.

Hands-on with 3D scanning

The Sprout team did a live demo for me, scanning in a toy dinosaur. They laid a green dinosaur on top of the HP 3D Capture Stage, which began to spin around slowly. Light from the camera at the top shone down on the object. An image of the dinosaur began to appear on the screen. The software captured the dinosaur’s image in slices, like a pie. Each slice took a few minutes to scan and materialize on the screen. After that, the software can take the pieces of the pie and stitch an image together.

Once the scan is done, the object becomes a file that you can view and manipulate. You can add your own effects to it or create overlays. You can change the material that it is made of, from wood blocks to plastic. And then you can send it off to a 3D printer. You can send it to a professional service that can mail the object back to you in about five days. Or you can send it to the Dremel printer for instant gratification, or, in this case, a plastic replica that takes a few hours to print. The Dremel printer is pretty easy to use. While it isn’t the fastest or most precise piece of equipment, it gets the job done.

Then, once your object is printed, you can hand-paint it to give it the final touches. Here’s a video of how that process works.

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The HP team also demonstrated how an advanced user can scan in an object more quickly. They can scan parts of an object and cut some corners, resulting in an image in a shorter amount of time. Here’s a video of the accelerated process.

All the things you can create

HP has created an app ecosystem that other developers can contribute to. HP recently announced seven new applications, including Crayola Color Alive, Ideum Origami Apprentice, Mobile5 SizeUp, Mischief for Sprout, Sprout Stop Motion, Sprout Light Stencil, and Sprout Video Capture. The Crayola app lets kids go nuts with coloring tools in conjunction with selfies.

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The Origami app lets kids figure out how to fold origami models via 3D visualization. You put paper on the Sprout’s surface mat and then go step by step through the folds while the upper screen provides animated and verbal instructions.

The Mobile5 SizeUp app lets you measure objects in real time using Sprout’s downward-facing camera. The measurements are projected on the mat overlaying the real object and shown on the vertical screen. It can instantly convert from metric to imperial systems or other units.

Mischief for Sprout lets you sketch objects and import 2D images via the overhead camera. Sprout Stop Motion lets you easily create stop-motion movies. You do so by putting real objects against digital backgrounds, and then mix them up using screen captures and editing tools. You can add sound via a microphone or import audio files.

The Sprout Light Pencil lets users trace, etch, or stencil onto physical objects using an image or design of their own creation. The app projects the image to the horizontal mat, and then the user can apply effects. You can trace, etch, or stencil the project image onto a preferred material, such as a wooden block, T-shirt, leather, or even a cake.

Lastly, the Sprout Video Capture lets you record video content from multiple cameras. You can trim and create multi-shot videos that can share instructions, projects, presentations, or special moments.

“Up until now, we had constraints from technology on how we could think,” said Gurdave Ahluwalia, ecosystem and partner strategist for Immersive Computing at HP, in an interview. “This allows us to change the equation around. Technology is now working for us, in terms of thinking in a 3D world.”

The promise of the future

Sprout can be used for collaboration, direct content transfer and manipulation, instant annotation and capture, 3D snapshots, and augmented reality. You can easily comment on your scanned creations and share them to social networks. Those who receive your 3D objects can view and manipulate them using an online 3D viewer, which allows them to rotate or resize an object to see it from multiple perspectives.

It will still be a while before you can instantly scan and print something that has the highest quality. There are other technologies still to come, such as those for virtual reality, that are likely to be part of the gadgetry needed to complete the vision of immersive computing and blended reality.

But it looks like the technology will eventually get there. And when it does, it will truly be amazing for artists, toy designers, product designers, architects, crafters, makers, engineers, archivists, museum curators, librarians, collectors, and creators of all kinds.

“[This technology will benefit] anybody with a creative thought, whether its parents with children, or teachers with students, or creative workers who want to do something at home,” said Ahluwalia.

One of these days, the scanning and printing processes will be almost instantaneous.

“The speeds are getting shorter, the quality is getting better,” Monsef said. “The materials are getting better, and the printers are getting cheaper.”

“3D printing is in its infancy, like 2D printing was 20 years ago,” Short added. “In the next five years, we’ll see a lot of improvements.”

Rather than printing toys that somebody else has made, some of the best uses of the technology are to create something that couldn’t have been done otherwise, or just would have been too expensive. People used to get baby shoes set in bronze to preserve special memories. But that was expensive. You can do that quite easily today using a 3D printer.