While doing one of my usual bored browses of the web looking for odd science projects, I ran across a page detailing a homemade 3d laser scanner. This is another of a long series of projects that I thought would be fun to do, but never have gotten around to working on. I’ve also seen a similar cheap setup done without a laser, but instead just using a simple light source and shadows. You can also look at another implementation of this idea here or
here.