Scanning for 3D Data with Lisa Federici of Scansite

Just as 3D printers range from hobbyist level, to professional, to commercial, so does the world of 3D scanners. Lisa Federici of Scansite, a company that has been doing professional 3D data scans since 1994, shares her enthusiasm for the growing 3D scanner market and why the different types all have their place in the industry. We also get her tips on what makes a good 3D scan better from her experience working with the military and high profile companies like Nike, Boeing, and Fitbit.

We’re going to take a deep dive into scanning, thanks in part to our sponsors over at MakerBot. When I say deep dive, I mean really deep. We’re going to scan again and again. We’re going to scan deeper. I read an article in Women in 3D Printing, which is a LinkedIn group that I belong to, with Lisa Federici. She is the CEO of Scansite 3D, which has been around since 1994.

This company has been doing CAD and scanning and editing CAD data and getting great 3D data for decades. It’s a husband and wife team who run the company. They have really done some amazing industry projects. They’re a leading provider of 3D scanning, 3D inspection and reverse engineering services. They do aerospace, automotive, museum and cultural heritage projects, industrial design projects, turbine and power manufacturers. They do work in the art and entertainment, gaming industry and things like that. Very, very cool broad spectrum of projects.

We invited Lisa on because we really wanted to hear about what high level 3D scanning is. We see so many of these new, stick it on your iPhone scanners. We still haven’t gotten ours. We backed a Kickstarter called Bevel. It’s in process, it’s in manufacturing. Hopefully, we’ll get it soon.

Although, interesting side note on that one, it shows you how technology changes so quickly. You have to watch out sometimes because that actual product is meant to plug in to your headphone jack of your cellphone. If you are getting a new iPhone 7 you’re screwed. You can’t use it. Fortunately, I still have an iPhone 6 so I’ll be able to use it. But I’m going to have to keep a legacy phone around to use it because they didn’t plan on that. That’s why time to market is so critical.

That and the Structure Sensor scanner by Occipital is another one we’ve used with an iPad. You’ll hear Lisa say in the interview how she respects those scanners. It’s all good even though her business, they work at the very, very high end, ultra high tolerance scanning compared to that. They still have respect for it. I think it’s really interesting. Let’s just go to hear what they do and hear from Lisa about the different types of scanning as well.

Listen to the podcast here:

Scanning for 3D Data with Lisa Federici of Scansite

Lisa, thank you so much for joining us to talk more about getting 3D data from scanners. I read an interview about you in Women in 3D Printing group on LinkedIn. I was very intrigued because we don’t get to talk about professional scanning enough. Not to mention, we don’t quite get as many women as I would love to have on the show. The fact that you’re CEO of your company and you’ve been working in this industry such a long time, it was just so great to be able to get you on our show.

Thank you. I totally agree. That was one of the reasons that I love what Nora and Barbara are doing in the Women in 3D Printing group. It was a really fabulous inaugural event. We had a lot of women there, as well as men. I have my own perspective on what women bring to the industries. I have a lot of really great women engineers and artists on staff here that I consider invaluable staff.

I would love to hear your perspective. Please, share with us your thoughts.

Women think in 3D already. We get involved in a lot of unusual projects, especially some of the art and cultural heritage stuff. Some of those editing projects take three, four, five, six months. I’ve actually been involved with projects that are two years just for our part of it. Usually, when we get something like that, it’s assigned to a single person and they need to really immerse themselves fully and live, eat and think whatever that particular data file is they’re working on.

I just find that women have a very strong eye when it comes to 3D. We have to make judgment calls sometimes about the data because when you’re working with lasers, everything in the world affects them. The competing light in the room, what the geometry is of the actual object, how far the object was from the scanner, what the settings are, what the surface reflectivity or color of the object is. You have to make judgment calls when you’re working on a Michelangelo. Is that scanner noise, is it an anomaly, or is it actually on the part?

 

We always take at least a couple hundred photographs for a project like that, as well as create the 3D data. They’ll be looking at the photograph and then they’ll be looking at the data and just confirming whatever we’re seeing should or should not be there. Our job often is not to make an interpretation about what we think it is, it’s to document it exactly. They have a sense of holding that big picture. They do very, very well in 3D. I’d say some of my best artists are women, digital artists.

So glad to hear that. Wow, Lisa. I’m astonished at the level of detail. I think we need to paint that mental picture for our audience a bit more. Let’s step back. You’re talking about spending a year or two on a single scan. That’s a heck of a project. I want to step back and really set that up a little bit, what you guys do there. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit about Scansite and what you’re doing and then let’s dive into a couple of these projects so we can understand that process. Because what you’re getting is seriously high resolution 3D data.

That’s right. We work in a number of industries. It can be automotive and aerospace, industrial design, forensics. We work with a lot of cultural heritage institutions, contemporary artists and anybody that has a need for very high end data. I made that call a long time ago because we were, I believe, the first company in the US actually to offer scanning as a service. It was pretty glitch-y technology back then.

Just because we needed to stay alive and we’re just fascinated by what this meant for the world, we figured out some pretty unique ways to make the technology work in the real world. Scanning was actually developed by the military and they were scanning targets after they blew them up and then basically critiquing how well their ammo worked. I was like, “Okay.”

Totally different.

Very different.

Let’s talk a little bit, because a lot of our listeners’ perception of scanning is going to be like this new little … I can’t even think of their names. Scanners that we’ve reviewed that are not quite the technology that you’re mostly using. You’re using a combination of technologies.

Our go-to equipment are called structured light scanners. They project a Moiré fringe pattern onto the surface of the object. That pattern changes as the machine is actually taking a scan. There’s two video cameras, one on either side, then there’s a CCD grid camera in the center. Those video cameras actually help us see what the scanner is seeing. That CCD grid computer in the center is actually recording the deformation that shows up in that Moiré fringe pattern, that light and dark shadow grid.

Some people call them optical scanners. They’re not laser. The difference between laser and optical scanners is typically the accuracy of the actual … Like a single point, how accurate that point is to the true surface of the object. It’s also the number of points that it gathers typically, the resolution. I often see resolution and accuracy thrown around a lot. I think it’s misunderstood typically by the public.

Very different. It’s like higher is better. You get confused by all of that.

If you’re scanning something with detail and those points are not close enough together then whenever you polygonize something, turn it into and STL, save to go onto 3D printing, you’re going to just soften out your 3D data. We always want to make sure we’ve got enough data and then we want to also want to make sure that every one of those points is a good point. It’s not just layers of data where the scanner is operating by best fit.

That’s what a lot of the, kind of the hobbyist level. You can even scan with an iPad. It’s all cool. It’s all really fun. It’s totally cool. It’s changing our world. I love it all. There’s a place for it all. Typically, the work that we get involved with is how those scans are put together is really one of the make it or break it things that make it so you can get great data.

It requires this higher level of what you called good 3D data, a good data point. Explain what’s the difference in that. As scan is a scan to a lot of people but it’s really what you do with that scan and how you interpret it that goes further.

You need to take multiple views of something. After you’ve gathered up the individual views, which you can think of just the same as you would a field of view in a camera. You have to merge all of those into a single description. That’s how you get a complete three dimensional scan. Most laser scanners and the desktop scanners and your iPhone, those work by what is called best fit.

You’re gathering a whole bunch of points, individual scan points and then the software is just crunching those together and wiggling the data back and forth until it finds common ground with enough points to merge that into a single description. The way that optical scanners work or structured light scanners work is actually by photogrammetries. They’re looking for coordination XYZ points. They’re not doing anything by best fit, it’s actually some very serious number crunching where it’s lining everything up by common reference points.

It’s by far superior. You also have a lot less noise. The scanners, just by their nature, generate noise, which is something that anybody that is involved with 3D printing or animation or a lot of what’s being used with scanned data today, they have to deal with a lot of that noise.

That’s the work actually. You want to start with the best scan possible so you can do the least amount of work afterwards.

Exactly. We try to get the data to be 110% because you’re always going to lose something. If you’re going back to 3D printing, depending on the printer that you’re using, even if you’re using the highest available printer out there, you’re always going to go backwards from the data. Even if you’re coming back into CAD or doing reverse engineering, you’re going backwards. At the end of the day, you have this stacked margin of error that you want to try to make as little as possible.

That’s a really interesting point, Lisa. We actually do this, we advise this all the time, is that just because your 3D printer can only accept a certain micron level or resolution level, however you want to consider it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start with a file that has better than that.

It’s absolutely true. Because we know most of the printers that we use have about 250 meg maximum and yet we’re getting, sometimes, gigabytes of information. We know, “Okay, we’re going to go onto 3D printing and we’re going to decimate that file down.”

There’s lots of incredible smart decimation software out there nowadays that will leave data in around features and area where it needs to use more to describe that and then take points out where it can. That’s really important. It’s not just you have a massive quantity of data. It’s that you have the right amount of really good data. To get there, you need to start with typically more data than you need.

Lisa, I understand and I think you and our audience can now understand that there’s scanning and then there’s scanning. There’s a big difference. Can you help us understand, to the extent that you can, some examples of customers that understand the difference. Obviously they must because they’re going to pay a lot more to have you create this data that’s needed to be so accurate. What kind of customer wants that data as compared to a scan they could do themselves and why?

Typically, for reverse engineering purposes or remanufacturing of legacy parts or inspection purposes. Those kinds of clients would be Boeing, Aero Metals, Nike, believe it or not does a tremendous amount of inspection and very high powered engineering work for their shoes. Here in Silicon Valley, we have clients such as Fitbit, Tesla, the Google … all of the driver-less car projects, I should say. What they’re doing, like with Fitbit, they had an instance come up recently where their bands on their little devices you wear on your wrist weren’t meeting the top piece, the little computer. They couldn’t figure out what was going on.

They were having a fit problem.

They were having a fit problem. They had spent eight months trying to figure out what was going wrong in their manufacturing process. We took the parts that they had questions about and the CAD file that they created and we scanned the parts and we overlaid the scan data to their CAD file. After they had struggled for eight months, probably in 24 hours told them where it was out. It was only out .02 millimeters. That was enough to keep it from making good contact.

Oh my gosh, I’d be kicking myself if I had spent eight months trying to figure that out. That’s a really good point. I don’t think people always understand the inspection side of, just in general, product development process. We are product designers so we’ve been doing this a long time. Just because you think you have a good file and you go to either 3D print it, you go to manufacture it and tooling, there’s all sorts of other things, other factors that happen.

There’s shrinkage, there’s timing, there’s temperature, there’s all these things that come out. Just because you think, “Oh, I put a data file in,” it was a digital data, doesn’t mean you get the exact out. Being able to measure that in any way, shape or form and inspect that is critically important.

It really is. People don’t operate or manufacture in a vacuum anymore, it’s very much a global supply chain. When you have so many different people working on the same product and you’re trying to figure out what went wrong in the process, it’s really important that they have valid, real information. In our case, we always try to just … That file is just critical because everything that happens, it goes backwards from there. It’s really, really important.

I want to touch a little bit on your comment about reverse engineering, because in some cases this is where scanning in and of itself is getting a bad rap. It’s not. When you’re talking about reverse engineering, you’re reverse engineering for purposes of really determining something. It’s not reverse engineering to knock it off.

A lot of times, it’s legacy parts that don’t have any information where it was just the parts were developed prior to CAD, prior to 3D. Like in the case of quite a bit of aerospace parts and particularly with military parts, I don’t think they ever thought that the pilots would still be flying planes that are 30, 40 years old. In the case of the military, they actually destroyed, purposely destroyed CAD drawings, 2D CAD drawings, or they hid them. Now, they’ve got to make these parts, they have to just make them, so they got to start from somewhere.

You need replacements.

You need replacements. I met with a client yesterday that’s one of the largest transportation companies that works with trains. They have the same issue. The trains are very, very old and they need parts.

That’s an interesting point because it’s not just that but also even if you are not replacing your part. There’s no reason to start redesigning from scratch either because you won’t do a good job of actually measuring everything and recreating that in CAD. I’ve seen that done and then they don’t understand why parts don’t fit and things don’t work. It’s because they tried to recreate it rather than have it scanned and started in that process. It’s not as accurate.

You mean when you reverse engineer something?

When you reverse engineer, but for the purpose of designing something new or designing the next iteration. If you can start with better data to begin with, to design from, or you’re designing a part that’s supposed to fit on this and you don’t necessarily have the CAD drawing of that or a CAD file of it.

For sure. There’s lots of different ways that companies use this information. Another client of ours is Square. Square makes point of sale devices. They have to fit on all the different types of iPhones or the Samsung phones and the iPads and that kind of thing. Apple does all contract manufacturing and they work with different facilities around the world. As long as their devices work internally, they don’t really care that much about the external part of it.

Square cares a whole lot because their point of sale devices need to make contact, just like that Fit product. Same with case manufacturers and keyboard manufacturers. You can’t necessarily just call up Apple and say, “Hey, can you give me your CAD file?” that they just spent maybe $150,000 developing.

They guard those very, very carefully.

They guard those very carefully. Apple likes us because we’re not really binging on anything that has to do with them and they like the fact that we’re supporting the people that make the cases or the people that make the point of sale devices because that just helps them sell products. That’s one case. Then you have, just take the whole auto industry.

If you look at cars today, you can tell they all look like a rehash of, “Oh, the bumper from this car and the door panels from that car and the front area from this car.” That’s because it’s all done with scanning and they definitely are making databases that they’ve just mix and match. They all do it and they all take it from one another. It’s become an industry standard.

What that did, if you think about car manufacturing, the old method, you had to think four years out. It was very difficult to even determine what the public was going to like then. You were taking a big risk. By the time you actually got your product to market, the whole attitude towards the car could’ve shifted. With scanning and reverse engineering, that whole product cycle from conception to a car sitting on the floor is down to about eight months now.

You’ve mentioned that, Lisa. When you were starting your business, I was working in automotive interiors designing textiles for car seats. We were working seven years out.

Oh my gosh.

Can you imagine? My job was to forecast and figure out what colors are people going to like, what pattern do they going to like, what textures do they want in their seating? Seven years from now.

I can’t imagine.

It needed to come down because you just couldn’t be right.

No, that would be very, very stressful.

It was.

Oh gosh. I know I’ve heard that criticism, about people knocking off other people’s parts. I don’t see that that much. You would think it would be more than it is, but I don’t really see that. We do a tremendous amount of new product development in here. It’s not as common as you might think. I think people have wised up to sending critical files overseas, unless they have a factory or relationship built up with the factory, because I think they don’t want that to happen.

We’ve had cases where stuff has gotten out. We use Solidworks in here. I can remember a case about two or three years ago that hit the news where one of the guys that worked overseas for the actual company was selling the kernel or the software. I think that they’ve really tightened up on that.

The point of getting good scanned 3D data and the way that you’re doing it is that that reverse engineering, it’s actually really difficult. It’s not an easy thing. It’s not just scan it and it’s ready to go and I can start making it. It doesn’t work like that. You still have to put a lot of work into it. In our mind, it’s almost faster to design new in some respects than it is to scan, rebuild, make it. The whole process of that is still very labor intensive.

That’s right. It is labor intensive. When you scan something and then you polygonize it and you just bring that back into a CAD package, unless you’re using a $50,000 package like TIA, you can’t even so much as pick two points and pull a measurement off of it. It is a manual process. You do have to bring that data into reverse engineering software, which takes a lot of expertise and the software is expensive and it is a manual process. I think this is just a tool. All of this stuff is amazing, it’s incredible. I call them tools because that’s what they are. They really give manufacturers or they’re anybody that has a need for high resolution data in their process. It’s just another tool in their toolbox.

Wow. I think you’re so right. We deal with a lot of smaller customers and clients in our business that are maybe a little naïve in doing business across the world, having unique manufactured for them. They all worry about being copied. Certainly, a lot of copying goes on, but I think that there’s a reality to originality of designs and products. If people are going to really jump through all those hoops to really dead nuts copy it, I don’t know, that takes such a huge effort to really do that. It’d better be worth it. If they’re going to go through that effort, I’m on to the next thing before they finally do that and they’re copying me.

It’s interesting. You think about the scenario with Apple not maybe giving their CAD files and they’re happy that you’ll scan it and provide that data to the case manufacturers and people like that. I don’t even know that I really understand that logic. Although it’s business for you so that’s great. I guess it is what it is. Different people have different opinions. They’re already onto the next thing. That’s probably it.

I think Lisa, this is so interesting because you touched so many different areas. I love the art preservation, the restoration work that you’ve done. The pictures on your site are amazing and how you’re preserving the future in a way that we can’t, because it is deteriorating. A lot of those sculptures and other things are deteriorating just based on being out and on show. Allowing those things to happen and those things to occur is a great service to our cultural community in general.

Thank you. I feel pretty strongly about it. It’s one of our core businesses, is working with the art and the cultural heritage stuff. I love it. I love the backstory of things and I love the fact that these things are being preserved, absolutely.

Usually, our last question is about opportunities. Do you have anything else that you would like to add before we go there or something that we missed that we should be asking you?

I

don’t so. You could look for us since you guys, I think, are in New York maybe or I’m not sure, LA. We just finished up a project with Major League Baseball. Since our season is wrapping up tonight, go Giants, I just wanted to maybe alert your listeners to take a look at the new batting champion awards that Major League Baseball will be giving out, one for the American League.

I saw them on your site. We are big baseball fans here. Go Red Sox.

I know.

But we are in Southern California. I saw them because you had them as part of the all-stars and that was here in San Diego.

They were debuted and a copy, just a gift, was given to the family of Tony Grano and Rod Cruz family. Anyway, those are going to be presented, I think probably in about a month.

Fantastic. We’d also like to have a little photo that our listeners can see but then they can go off to your site or MLB or wherever they need to to get more detail. That’s fantastic. Thank you Lisa, for coming on. I want to wrap up by asking, what do you think is the biggest opportunity for improvements in the 3D scanning industry that might help the 3D print industry grow?

Oh gosh. I think continued algorithms for how the scans are put together so that’s not everybody has to have a $200,000 machine to create a great file. I am really blown away by a lot of the 3D printers that are on the market today. Even with a lot of the desktop printers, there are some amazingly good ones. I think the better the file that people can have with their desktop printer, we are really close to blowing the doors off of this stuff. I love it, actually.

Now, out of curiosity, what do you think are some of the really good ones? What would be the desktop 3D printers that you think have achieved that level?

I have a client that has one, I think it’s called a Zortrax. Really nice one. The InVision, those are a little bit more money but do some amazing parts. Those are probably my two favorites.

Great.

Because we have clients that will use us for scanning because they need a really great file but then they’re doing their own 3D printing. Especially a lot of our contemporary artists and some of our toy manufacturers and things. I’ve been pretty impressed actually with the stuff they’re producing.

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that.

Thanks again for coming on the show, Lisa. We really appreciate your time today. Your insights, I think it has really opened our eyes to the expanses and importance of scanning.

Great. Thank you so much for having me.

Scanning for 3D Data – Final Thoughts

As I said to Lisa, I think it’s really educational to understand, there is scanning and then there’s scanning. There’s desktop scanning. We know that. There’s 3D printing and there’s 3D printing. There are levels, and clearly what they’re doing is topnotch. If you’re going to spend a year or two scanning a sculpture or doing some other project, that’s an intense amount of work. It’s very expensive, I’m sure. It’s also highly accurate. There are needs for that. There are times and places.

Clearly, she thinks the less expensive scanners out there are doing wonderful things and that’s great. There comes a time when you need that accuracy. To me, it was interesting. I have a good analogy for that, for our listeners, about the difference and something I remember from my youth.

My mother used to work in the 80s for a company in Connecticut that built Hubble Space Telescope. They were creating this. This was like, at the time, state of the art, the most accurate telescope. They said you could put the telescope at the top of the Empire State Building in New York and aim it toward Washington, DC and you could read the date on a dime if it were mounted on the top of the spire of the Capitol Building. That’s how incredibly accurate, forgiving the curvature of the earth. You could really see that accurately.

The way that happens is with not only lenses but with an incredibly flat mirror. They’re polishing this mirror and then there’s flat and then there’s really flat. This is the analogy. They’re saying that if you took that mirror that they polished to be ultra-flat and stretch it across the United States, at the time, the highest peak or valley across the mirror over that size would have been about an inch.

You can think how incredibly flat that is. I think as it relates to scanning, that’s another good analogy as to the structures, the geometries. She used a great term, polygonize. When they polygonize a scan and reduce it to the actual geometry, they’re doing some hyper accurate work there in CAD. It is amazing.

Maybe the reason why she is such a supporter of the new technologies that are coming out that are lower cost, because what it really does show you is that broad difference in the quality level. You know if you need higher resolution, it actually makes her sales job easier, because you know when that’s not good enough, when it couldn’t do the job you expected it to do. It was still a ton of work because it is a ton of work to clean up these scans.

Boy, wasn’t that fascinating to learn about Fitbit and the problem they had fitting things together? I’m sure all those engineers were scratching their heads saying, “Hey, the CAD data is accurate. I’ve measured it with my digital calipers, which are pretty good.” Again, there’s a difference between measuring, looking, analyzing and then taking that analysis to another level.

By scanning it, what did she say, .002 of a millimeter off or something or a micron off? I forget. I’ll have to listen to that again. It was an incredibly small difference. Probably out of spec from what the engineers spec-ed, but they couldn’t measure it and determine that was the flaw that was preventing it from working.

Here’s the thing, what we find a lot in product design and development is that those specs that are set about, the tolerance that are set about, you think are okay and you usually set them into something you can measure but then you don’t realize when it’s something out of your ability to measure and inspect the effect that it may have. For some things, it’s a cascade of effects. One part is slightly out and then the next part is slightly out and now, the fit between the two are extremely out. Now, it no longer fit together.

Each is at the opposite end of the tolerance spectrum. It’s actually your tolerances that have to be reset and your ability to inspect and measure has to be reset in a very different way in which there are technologies coming along that are scanning to be able to determine that. I learned that early on in my textile industry work, that you’re talking about measure the width and diameter of a filament, which is very tiny in some respects.

Let’s make sure we distinguish for our audience between a 3D printing filament. We’re talking about a thread being used in a woven fabric. That’s also called a filament. There’s a big difference. The diameter of that thread is almost immeasurable to the naked eye but they use optical scanners to look for voids and the open spaces in which a thread was broken or no longer was there.

It creates a defect into the quality of something that would make it fall apart, make it tear, make it no longer viable for a particular industry and you mark that. When you’re cutting and sewing, you surround that or you just discard it and you no longer use it. That industry has come a long way with being able to measure that, but they do that through an optical scanning measurement.

A lot of that is structured light, that’s exactly how they do it. When she talks about a Moiré pattern, that’s that grid that’s projected on it that’s creating this. Are you seeing anything that’s out of place? Are you seeing anything that’s deforming that? It’s another world.

I’m remembering also, going back probably ten years or more over in China. This is actually an interesting little anecdote that relates to how technology has changed and CAD and 3D printing have all changed things in manufacturing. A manufacturing company that I was working with at the time were still making physical three dimensional models by people in a shop that were sculpting foam and adding putty to it and sanding all over and over again until they got those surfaces and those forms to be exactly what they wanted. It was very old school way of making a physical part.

They would ship it over to China where the products are going to be manufactured. They would have rather had CAD data and made a tool based on that but they were getting a physical thing and. They would need to, we called it “scan the products.” I guess they called it digitizing as well. They would set the part and mount the part so it wouldn’t move and then would have this probe on an arm that looks like a boom mount for a microphone or a luxo lamp sort of thing.

You can move it anywhere and would actually have the probe touch the object and move it along the surface of the object and it would be capturing that CAD data, like scanning not with structured light but by physically touching and eventually creating a three dimensional mesh out of that. That was also very tedious. I don’t know really how accurate it was.

Now, people would rarely do that. They would probably be scanning it in this way with structured light or an occipital scanner or infrared, whatever and then making CAD data out of that. Of course, I would prefer to just create CAD brand new in the computer and make it what you want it to be rather than to read what’s summed the other physical thing is.

We talk about this all the time, we are not as familiar with 3D scanning in that sense because we create from scratch. That’s the way that we do. It’s just our process is faster and more creative and that’s the way we prefer to work. But there’s a complete place and time for all of these kinds of scanning technologies. That’s why we’re always out there seeking it and wanting to learn more about it.

There’s a huge need in all sorts of different industries. Obviously, their company, existing for more than 20 years and being successful out of it is evidence of the need.

This is airing and we don’t actually know the outcome of the World Series right now. I’m crossing my fingers. It’s going to be the Red Sox. It’s Big Papi’s last season, they need to go all the way.

Lisa’s company, Scansite, has done the, I guess you would consider them the trophies. They scanned the figurines that are going to be on them and then created the CAD geometry for them to be cast. I believe that they’re cast. It’s really an interesting project. Hopefully, somebody we have been rooting for is winning it right now. That would be nice. That was a lot of fun. I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did. Learned a few things. Very cool. There’s always another level. It’s quite exciting.

Important Links

• Scansite 3D
• Women in 3D Printing LinkedIn Group
• Lisa’s Interview with Women in 3D Printing

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About Lisa Federici

In 1991 Lisa Federici successfully launched one of the first 3 dimensional technology companies in the world. Since its founding, Scansite3D has continued to pioneer the fields of 3D digital scanning, 3D metrology, 3D content creation and reverse engineering; and has continued to pave the way by engaging new hardware, software and methods as soon as they are available. This dedication to the industry has allowed Scansite to forge many long term and successful working relationships with a variety of companies such as Boeing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NASA, Tesla, NIKE, Hyundai, Warner Bros, Square, Stanford University and the Smithsonian.

Scansite3D is the leading provider of reverse engineering and 3D digitizing services and the application of these technologies to advance the fields of manufacturing, automotive, industrial design, art, aerospace and cultural heritage.

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