Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s 3D scanning app is now available

After much anticipation, Huawei officially announced the Mate 20 and the Mate 20 Pro a little more than a month ago. No matter which version you choose, the latest and greatest from Huawei is packed with hardware including the Kirin 980 SoC (packed with dual NPUs), up to 6GB of RAM, a huge focus on photo quality, and more. There’s also a lot of software that was shown off at the launch event as well and one that caught a lot of people’s eye was a 3D scanning app for the Mate 20 Pro called 3D Live Maker. Sadly, that app wasn’t available at launch, but those who own the Pro version of the Mate 20 can now try out the new feature.

Creating a virtual 3D avatar of an actual physical object isn’t new in the Android space. A little over a year ago I wrote about an application called 3D Creator that was developed by Sony. One of our talented community developers in the forum had ported it to other devices but we had to remove the download link at Sony’s request. The idea is the same though. You take an actual object and use a special application to capture its physical elements. The process can be tedious as the technology is new and the results may not be as you would expect. So here is what Huawei is showing off in their app store.

So we see a rendered bear in the first screenshot to represent an actual stuffed bear. Then you can see the idea is to take multiple photographs of the physical object at various angles so the software can fully capture a virtual avatar of the object. Just like with Sony’s 3D Creator app, this can take quite a lot of time and the app expects things to be just right for the final result to be accurate. So it was XDA Senior Member punkthemonk who let our forum community know the 3D Live Maker app is available for current Huawei Mate 20 Pro owners.

As we continue through the thread XDA Junior Member myomar showed us their results of the application when they tried it out. They have been nice enough to upload 4 different images from start to finish. The first image you’ll see is the actual objects they are scanning using the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and then we get to see how they look when they are digitally created.

For what it’s worth, the digital 3D avatar of the stuffed bear turned out pretty well. But we can see how this technology falls short a bit when capturing complex objects like the tentacles of the octopus. The application is in its infancy though so we should see Huawei pushing out multiple updates to enhance its accuracy as more people start to use it.