My 3D scan of the abandoned Orange Julius at my local dead mall came out looking like a haunted milkshake

I tried using my phone's lidar to capture the old counter and frosty machine at the Rolling Acres Mall annex, and every single frame has this creepy blue ghost blob hovering where the blenders used to sit, so now I'm wondering if anyone else's photogrammetry projects in these places pick up weird artifacts or if my phone just needs a recalibration.

2 comments

2 Comments

calebrivera21d ago

That first scan of the old Orange Julius counter at Rolling Acres came out looking like a haunted milkshake for me too, but I used to think those blue ghost blobs were just my phone freaking out from bad lighting... like, I figured the lidar was just smearing the point cloud on those old stainless steel blender bases and frosty machine parts because of all the reflective surfaces. Then I ran a second pass with a proper tripod and a slower orbit around the whole setup, and that same weird blue artifact still showed up hovering right where the old counter blenders sat, even in the raw mesh before cleanup. Honestly it took seeing someone else post a similar scan of a different dead mall's Orange Julius with the same phantom blob before I stopped blaming my phone and started wondering if there's actually something to these artifacts, you know? The way the frosty machine's rubber gaskets and those crusted-over syrup drip trays catch the light at that specific angle might just be creating a weird spectral reflection pattern that lidar misreads as a solid surface... mine's still sitting in processing with that blob untouched because I kind of like how it looks now.

the_henry20d ago

Dude that's exactly what I was going through with my scan of the old Orange Julius at Northgate Mall. I ran three passes with different settings and that blue blob kept showing up in the exact same spot near the blender station no matter what I did. Left it in there too because it adds this weird layer of history that makes the scan feel more real somehow, like the machine's ghost is still trying to whip up a strawberry banana.