I'm the guy who asks security at the airport if I can take a picture of my luggage passing through the X-ray machine. I'm also the guy who looked at my broken jaw on the CT scan for an entire hour with both utter fascination and horror. I suppose I've been a little obsessed with spectral imaging.
Therefore, when a company by the name of Lumafield told me that I could load as many things as I wanted into its radiographic density scanning machine, which costs $54,000 per year, I had a sneaking suspicion that they didn't believe me.
I entered the company's San Francisco satellite office last month carrying an overstuffed backpack containing.
One vintage Polaroid camera; one original Palm Pilot; one Philips Hue smart light bulb; one Oral-B electric toothbrush; one Elgato Stream Deck Mini; one second-generation Apple Pencil; three sets of gamepads (PS5 DualSense, Xbox One Elite, and Nintendo Switch); one magnetic wireless charging battery pack that also doubles as a handheld game system; one Dart Zone foam blaster with parts I'd 3D printed to make it look like Master Chief's pistol from Halo
Lumafield's first scanner, the Neptune, is a massive apparatus that initially resembles a massive black microwave oven. The scanning chamber is protected while the machine is in use by a thick sliding metal door that measures six feet in width and six feet in height and weighs 2,600 pounds. Close that entryway and press a button on its coordinated touchscreen, and it'll start up to 190,000 volts worth of X-beams through anything you put on the pivoting platform inside.
I started with my Polaroid OneStep SX-70, a classic camera with rainbow stripes that arguably introduced instant photography to the general public for the first time. The company's cloud servers transformed the Neptune's rotating radiograms into the closest thing I've ever seen to superhero X-ray vision after 45 minutes and 35 gigabytes of data.
I am able to manipulate these objects in 3D space using only a basic web browser. I can see every gear, wire, chip, and spring when I melt their plastic casings to the bare metal. I am able to digitally slice out a section that is worthy of the hashtag r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn. contains no actual pornography) without ever using a saw or water jet. Sometimes I can finally see how a device works.
But Lumafield isn't making these machines to help us reverse engineer or satisfy our curiosity. It rents them mostly to businesses that need to dissect their own products to make sure they don't fail, businesses that couldn't afford the industrial CT scanners of the past.
A soil moisture sensor that Eduardo Torrealba, a prize-winning engineering student, had developed, sold, and crowdfunded a decade earlier was eventually acquired by ScottsMiracle-Gro. Random fact: We previously featured Disney's Aireal and Microsoft's IllumiRoom as prizewinners on The Verge.) Since then, Torrealba has worked as an independent consultant for hardware startups and as a director of engineering at Formlabs to develop the Fuse 1 selective laser sintering 3D printer, which he uses to help people prototype products.
He encountered issues with manufactured parts not performing as expected throughout, and the most compelling solution appeared to be a piece of laboratory equipment: the computed tomography (CT) scanner, which generates a series of X-ray images that each depict a single "slice" of an object. He asserts that purchasing and maintaining good ones can run a million dollars.
So in 2019, he and his fellow benefactors began Lumafield to democratize and promote the CT scanner by building its own without any preparation. It's currently a 80-man organization with $67.5 million in subsidizing and a modest bunch of huge name clients including L'Oréal, Trip Bicycles, and Saucony.
"Assuming the main vehicles that existed were Ferraris, much less individuals would have vehicles. However, "I don't need a Ferrari to get to the corner store to get a gallon of milk," he tells The Verge, comparing the Lumafield Neptune to an affordable Honda Civic.
He admits that the Neptune isn't as good as a traditional CT because it can't easily scan things bigger than a bike helmet, doesn't have a resolution of one micron, and probably won't let you look at individual chips on a circuit board. In my scans, I had trouble recognizing certain digital components.
However, Lumafield's "gallon of milk" has only been able to sell scanners to businesses that do not require high resolution and primarily want to see why their products fail without destroying the evidence. "Really, we compete with sawing things open," says Lumafield's director of marketing, Jon Bruner.
According to Bruner, the majority of businesses still use a band saw, cutting products in half, as the current state of the art. But sometimes the saw doesn't make sense. A few materials discharge poisonous residue or synthetic substances when you cut them. Numerous batteries catch fire. Additionally, adding the impact of slicing a running shoe in half makes it harder to see how running affects it. We are replacing destructive testing in fields like plastic packaging, batteries, and performance equipment,” Bruner adds.
When L'Oréal discovered that the bottle caps for its Garnier cleansing water were leaking, it turned out that the problem was a 100-micron dent in the bottle's neck. This was something the company found in its very first Lumafield scan, but traditional tests never picked up on it. Bruner says that is on the grounds that the past strategy is chaotic: You "immerse in resin, cut it open with a bandsaw, and hope you hit the right spot," as the saying goes.
A CT scanner eliminates the need for cutting: To figure out what's wrong, you can spin, zoom, and go digital slice by digital slice. With just a few clicks, you can measure distance with the Lumafield web interface, and the company also sells a flaw detection add-on that automatically detects tiny hollow areas in an object, called porosity; It is looking for pores, which could eventually develop into cracks.
However, such technology is typically only available to select businesses like major medical device manufacturers and aerospace contractors. Bruner relates, "Tony Fadell said that even Apple didn't have a CT scanner until they started working on the iPod nano." An investor in Lumafield is Fadell, co-founder of Nest and the Apple iPod.)
According to Torrealba, whereas a basic industrial CT scanner might cost $250,000 and require $50,000 annually in software, maintenance, and licensing fees, a scanner comparable to the Neptune would cost $750,000 to $1 million upfront. In the meantime, he claims, some customers are paying Lumafield just $54,000 per year (or $4,500 per month), while others are paying upwards of $75,000 per year with a few add-ons like a lower-power, higher-resolution scanner or a module that can compare a component to its CAD design. The price of each scanner includes the software and support, unlimited scans, and access for as many employees as you want. It also includes shipping to your office.
How is it possible that Lumafield's CT scanner costs so much less? According to Bruner, "there has never been market pressure within the industry to push costs down and make it more accessible." For example, aircraft manufacturers have only ever requested machines with higher performance, not machines that are more affordable, and Lumafield sees this as an opportunity.
According to Torrealba, there are numerous additional factors, such as the fact that the company employed PhDs to design and construct the scanners from scratch, assembled them at its own facilities in Boston, developed its own software stack, and developed a cloud-based reconstruction pipeline in order to reduce the amount of compute required for the actual machine.
Even after conducting two interviews, I am unsure of Lumafield's level of success since it emerged from stealth early last year. Torrealba claims that the team has shipped more than ten machines but fewer than one hundred, and he would only say that the number is neither 11 nor 99. They wouldn't mention any customers' names unless they were already on their case studies page.
However, Lumafield is causing a stir, if the director of marketing is to be believed. According to Bruner, "a lot of the big household names" in the consumer packaged goods category have signed on as well. "In the case of shoes, we have many of the household names in that space." It's a group of companies that make batteries, some of which are big and some of which are small. Lumafield has also inquired about the interest of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which it describes as "a handful of customers" in the product design consulting industry.
Lumafield is of the opinion that it has a good chance of gaining business from industries that have previously utilized CT scanning, such as auto component and medical device manufacturers, primarily due to its speed. Even though it took hours to complete many of the high-quality scans of my gadgets, Bruner says that even businesses that have access to CT scanners may not have them on hand and must mail the part to the appropriate facility or an independent scanner bureau. It's the difference between getting an answer to your engineering issue in two hours and waiting a week.
What's more, for straightforward infusion shaped items like some vehicle parts, Lumafield even retrofitted the Neptune with a completely programmed entryway, so a robot arm can swing parts all through the machine after a speedy go/off limits porosity check that requires well under a moment to finish. According to Torrealba, more than one customer is currently inspecting each and every part on their production line, and one customer is "doing something adjacent" to the auto part illustration.
Torrealba admits that automation was not the original purpose of the Neptune, but he wants to design it for high-volume production in the future because he sees enough interest from customers.
Throughout the entire time I've been writing and editing this story, I've had my Polaroid camera on my desk. Every now and then, I can't help but pick it up and think about what's inside the rainbow-striped plastic case. It makes me appreciate the designers more, and it's fascinating to imagine how engineers in the future might use these scanners to build and test their next products.
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