What are 3D Scanner ?

There are many different devices that can be called 3D scanners. Any device that measures the physical world using lasers, lights or x-rays and generates dense point clouds or polygon meshes can be considered a 3D scanner. They go by many names, including 3D digitizers, laser scanners, white light scanners, industrial CT, LIDAR, and others. The common uniting factor of all these devices is that they capture the geometry of physical objects with hundreds of thousands or millions of measurements.