“My teeth are now fixable by a laptop, an email address and some a crylic”
Below, for your edification and delight, is a 3D scan of your correspondent’s teeth. Or, to be more accurate, a smartphone picture of a remote-access screen app logged in over Wi-Fi to a Dell laptop running imaging software driven by a thing that looks like a handheld food mixer, connected via USB. Don’t worry: I can get through the things I want to say about this amazing gadget without having to tell you any gory dental details of what happened to me in central London during the pandemic.
Richard Kahan is the operator of the device. I’ve discussed him a few times due to his love of technology: his small classroom with Microsoft Surface workstations was helping students manipulate exact 3D models of troublesome teeth half a decade ago or more. It’s interesting to note the differences between then and now. Perhaps the most important advancement has been that those original, spinnable, gaily multicoloured teeth were 3D models, crafted in an editing module of a rendering package. As they say in all the least watchable videos about dentistry, “no real teeth were harmed in the making of this programme”. Come bang up to date, and the need to construct example teeth from scratch in software has disappeared.
