DekkoScan Takes Pics And Builds Minecraft Worlds

Yes, I am reporting on an iPhone app, but one that has interesting implications for the PC version of Minecraft, as well as science-fiction. While drifting through the Reddit rapids this morning, I happened upon DekkoScan and did a double-take. It's a phone app that allows you to take pictures of objects and turn them into Minecraft maps, which seems like something that should already exist. It's currently awaiting Apple's approval (aren't we all), but soon you'll be able to photograph anything and cram them into Minecraft. Great! Now I have to worry about a wizard taking my photo and turning me into a hill in Minecraft. The horror of being hollowed out, chipped away, or reformed into a penis statue is creeping me out.

It's clearly the first step of the technology: the phone's memory limitations, and Minecraft's blockiness, means it'll never be a perfect match, and it's currently limited to a 128x128 output, but I'm happy enough with the poster's outcome. The in-game object really does resemble the real-world owl.

It went from this.

To this.

There are other methods of achieving this, but as this tutorial shows they tend to involve multiple photos and multiple programs. I'm going to give it a go, but I can see me using the app more than a daisy chain of programs.