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Ladies and gentlemen,

I have seen the future of foot/ cast scanning and motion analysis and it's here:
http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/

Watch the video. How cool is that?

 

Very cool what you see is what you get .Warts and all ( BOOM BOOM)

 

Looks very interesting

 

Simon,

Sorry. What am I missing? I ended up at a webpage from the Univ. of Cambridge Engineering Department with some solid models on it and a technique for probablistic model creation, but nothing foot related.

 

The point.;)

 

Phil Wells wrote something in another post about a four camera scan

 

I want one for christmas... ill send the misses off with my new wish list. out goes the pack of socks and useless golf gadgets!

 

Hardly.

The demonstrated project is of a sharp edged geometry with textures and very simple shapes. Even within that very controlled environment, it fails to remove webs in included angles.

In the organic world, where textures and surface reflectivity are not controlled and the 3D surfaces infinitely more complex, it is not clear how this technique would produce anything other than very noisy data.

None of this however is to minimize the very cool display presented and the impressive result. Thanks for sharing.

 

Yeah, I remember seeing a prototype of something resembling the contact digitizer which you now sell at the Chelsea School of Chiropody, too many years ago to remember. The concept was good but it was full of flaws... You'll see the analogy I'm sure. Can you digitize a foot and then move it around and have the software track it using Amfit? Rhetoric.

The point is, it's a stepping stone. Scanning with just a web-cam and then tracking the object as it moves: this is the future, but perhaps not in your mind as you don't want to go down that route because you know what that would mean. Contact digitizing is probably the equivalent of Betamax, a good system, but soon to be overtaken by better, cheaper systems.

 

Simon,

I am not Amfit-myopic. I don't even know why you bring it up. I was commenting on the technical long-view of an interesting engineering project you brought to our attention.

I don't think your intention was to turn this thread into a discussion of the relative merits of different technological methods for measuring foot geometry or image-based gait analysis. It seems appropriate however to view this engineering project in the context of how it might be applied to those ends as you introduced it in that context.

 

That's correct. So you don't think this is a development that might in the future be exploited within podiatry for acquisition of positive model data and motion analysis because.....

 

As I pointed out in my first posting, the technique will produce noisy data for 3D modeling purposes, so no, I don't think it's useful for positive modeling of organic shapes (like feet)...it may well be useful for gait analysis where many of the things to observe are the relationships of large body structures and a little noise in the data will not significantly effect the diagnostic conclusions. Even in that case, it does not suggest a good way to evaluate the function of the foot itself in gait.

 

I suspect that as the process is developed the noise will be reduced. It's early days.

For motion analyses see: Microsoft x-box project natal
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/