Point Cloud Scanning with the Xbox 360 Kinect

by Justin Doughty

’ve always been interested in point clouds and ways to capture the world in 3D. Usually this requires expensive equipment along with equally expensive software. Talking to my colleague Geoff Woodhead, he mentioned that Faro provide a free piece of software that works with the Xbox 360 Kinect. Having previously worked with various scanning methods, he also gave me some very useful scanning tips. So I had everything I needed to start capturing point clouds.

Things you need:

1. A Xbox 360 Kinect (these can easily be found gathering dust behind your TV or boxed in a cupboard)
2. The Faro Scenect Software which can be downloaded for free from:http://www.faro.com/scenect/scenect
3. A PC, preferably a laptop as this makes for more mobile scanning.

As I have Windows 8.1 this took a little configuring to get the software to see the sensor, but once this was done, it started to scan straight away.

I started scanning initially with a basic room, and various objects, but for my blog I thought I would show something far more interesting…me!

My colleague Geoff kindly performed the scan, steadily moving the Kinect sensor in a full 360 degree path, while I tried to stay as still as possible.

The process of the scan in Scenect can be seen below, you can see the points being picked up:

The software has various export options, I chose to use .pts format. This was then entered into Recap for editing, which gives me the flexibility to enter the point cloud into a wide range of Autodesk Products: