Scan The World is a new site for free Creative Commons scans of real-world objects, aimed at people who want to waste time and money on making worthless plastic tat 3D-print delightful plastic objects. We’ve seen such sites before, but this one looks like it’s well-organised and commercial enough to succeed.

Sadly the 3D printing angle means that “objects” is often where it ends, as nearly all my test downloads under full Creative Commons were simple .OBJs and thus lacked the vital photogrammetric textures seen in the previews. Those that did have textures tended to be under non-commercial Creative Commons. Such as this fab 3D printable Cat Armour.

I somehow doubt has a medieval original, but there were medieval rocket-cats, so you never know…

Overall, despite the limitations and ads Scan The World is an ‘open downloads’ site and no sign-up is required to download.

Malopolska’s Virtual Museums in Poland have kindly placed over 1,000 textured .OBJ models in the public domain under CC0. They appear to be hi-res photogrammetry. A log-in is required to download. There are also photos of the original object, e.g X-ray tube at 4000px.

Petal Search, an English search-engine by China’s Huawei and apparently with its own index. After cleaning all the unwanted cruft off the front-page with uBlock, it can be made nicely minimalist…

Images seemed the most useful. But it turns out the ‘HD’ filter is puny, regarding a mere 900 x 1200 as ‘high’. Still it’s possibly useful as a third-opinion on images, as it gives very different results than DuckDuckGo Images or Google Images.

News feels like Bing, but without the extreme timeliness and with a whole lot of local British news seeming to be filtered through a cheesy relayer called dailyadvent.com rather than going directly. At a guess that may be to comply with Chinese government requirements?

The main search is sprinkled with ad-cards, but these are easily removed with uBlock. Definitely not as good as Google for the first page. I suspect the problem is in running weaker semantics on the query rather than in the index.

One thing it is is fast. Very fast. They’ll be using their own ‘special’ routers, no doubt.