With 13 days still to go it’s incredible to see Occipital’s Structure Sensor hitting $1,014,278 in pledges on Kickstarter with a mere goal of $100,000. With the promise that you can – “Scan objects and rooms in 3D, play augmented reality games, and develop mobile apps with 3D vision” – it’s not hard to understand why there are, as of now, 2,796 individual backers.

But a the key to this success, I believe, lies in a single word on the Kickstarter campaign page – ‘hackable’. 

Dr. Gary Bradski, President & CEO of OpenCV underlines the importance of that word, “I really like how this device was designed from the beginning to be open and hackable because we don’t know which way it’s going to go.”

That’s what makes this an extra appealing and exciting gadget. And indeed the Kickstarter page hints at how Occipital imagine the hackers can take advantage to create exciting virtual reality control systems –

Of course control systems are only one possibility. Imagine using the room scanning capability to recreate a digital simulations of real places (museums, monuments, etc.) in VR. And imagine the implications of that for education and training.