Scan your own 3D characters into Minecraft with Intel RealSense camera

Minecraft fans are a passionate lot, so you have to figure they’ll go crazy about scanning their own characters into the voxel-graphics game.

Mark Day, chief executive of VoidAlpha, has created Minescan, an app that allows you to scan a physical object into Minecraft. You can scan in a character like an octopus or squirrel, and the app will convert it into voxel style, or blocky graphics. You can then insert the digitized character into the Minecraft game.

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I saw Day scan an Octopus and a Ninja squirrel character into the game in a matter of minutes.

The scanner uses an Intel RealSense camera, which can detect 3D objects and then transform them into digital imagery. With Minescan, you just rotate the object on a turntable and the RealSense camera scans in the object.

“It’s an easy-to-use modding tool,” said Day in an interview with GamesBeat at the Intel Developer Forum last week. “We are in a strong beta test now, and I expect to ship it in the next 30 days.”

The project is funded by Intel, and it will be available in Intel’s RealSense app store. VoidAlpha was started in 2011 to make games for smartphones, tablets, and th eweb.