Photo of Microsoft engineers showing off Kinect Fusion, 3D scanning software for the Kinect for Windows motion sensing device, at Microsoft's BUILD 2012 developer conference from October 30, 2012 ...

There are countless applications of this technology, such as scanning objects to duplicate with a 3D printer, or importing yourself into a video game.

The software maker announced today that the 3D object scanning capabilities of Kinect Fusion will be baked into the Kinect for Windows SDK in a future release.

If you want to do some 3D scanning, you usually have to get either a dedicated scanner or a less-than-elegant add-on. Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford think there's a better way ...