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With COVID-19 becoming more of a daily life rather than a short quarantine, the need for 3D-scanned rooms has drastically increased. From real estate agents using 3D-scanning to make virtual walkthroughs, to schools wanting to create virtual classrooms and learning spaces. Being able to provide a more interactive virtual landscape for students across the country during this time of need will give them the closest experience they could have to being in a classroom while at home. The problem with this is the range of technologies out there for the common person who would want to use it. Either the hardware or software is extremely expensive to use. It requires a high level of technical background to set up and develop on your own environment on your personal computer. Both routes involve a plethora of photos that need to be taken and a lot of moving around to frame the images, especially in large spaces. 

The current status quo for creating three-dimensional models of rooms in industry is to use matterport cameras. These cameras are created to capture multiple images at a time, and stitch them into a 3d model. These cameras make it easier to create 3D-scans at a high resolution and good detail. The problem with matterport cameras however is that they are very expensive. Listed at around $2995, the average user would have to make an investment to be able to use it. Along with this, any scans created are put into the database that matterport owns. This causes questions of security for companies or people who are taking the images for their own use.

There are other options besides the matterport camera. There are many open source projects that can be used. The benefits for these are that they do not cost any money other than the camera that is used, which is cheaper than the matterport, and the scanned images can be accessed through any media that the user wants to use. 

The vision for this project was to create a 3D-scanning software that is both affordable and user friendly. The project will be utilizing the Intel Realsense D455 camera priced at $239.00. Our project is able to work on a desktop PC or laptop PC. We utilize Dot3d to scan and create pointclouds of environments. From there, we use an open-source software solution; MetaShape to create meshes and textures for each model environment. The last part of our suite of software is our Unreal Engine plugin that transfers models easily into the game-world.