Since we’ll be hosting part of a documentary, I thought it would be a good idea to consider a “clean up” update of the scanner. I started working on this update mainly for the face scan part, but all the changes will apply to the crowd version.
New camera power supply
The currently used camera supplies were consumer-base hardware, and every camera had its own power supply, with an enormous amount of ugly and unnecessary cables. With this addition, we have a new series of industrial power supplies, one for each segment of the scanner; each can supply power for six cameras. The design is much cleaner, and the system power management should also be more stable while working.
New cable management
Finally, I’ve found a way to hide cables without going crazy every time I need to change something. The cable holders are black, like the other parts of each section, and I’m totally in love with how they look now.
New Camera Holders
This is the fourth iteration of this system, and I think we have a very good system for holding our camera now. The previous design was made because of our previous aluminum poles; now that we have switched to 3030 profiles, we can use a lot less space in the section. Another good thing about this design is that now we can add cameras on both sides of the same profile.
New Lighting Diffusion System
This was super tough, but we got rid of the “laundry” (as Paolo used to refer to the system of diffusion sheets we were using so far). We switched to a much cleaner, more performant system of 160cm tall softboxes. Apart from the aesthetic, we’ll have two main benefits from this switch:
- Now, the light will not leak everywhere and will be more focused on the person, with the internal softboxes acting as a reflector pointed to the inside of the scanner.
- We can now finally work with cross-polarization as the boxes can be covered entirely with a polarizing sheet (that I already bought)