Taking 2D photos with your phone is rather popular these days, but thanks to Caltech scientists, soon you may be able to wave your phone at an object and capture a 3D scan of it. You could scan a particularly nice coffee cup, and then instantly send the 3D scan to a 3D printer and produce an exact copy.

The breakthrough is in making a 3D scanner small enough to fit inside a phone; existing systems are large and bulky. The Caltech team has developed a tiny silicon chip called a nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI), which uses an array of LIDAR sensors—sort of a laser-based radar—to determine the distance and size of the object, by measuring laser light reflected off the object. Amazingly, all of that technology fits into a chip that's just a millimeter square in size, making it easy to embed in devices like smartphones.

Currently, the NCI boasts only a 4-by-4 array of LIDAR elements, so the scans are limited to just 16 pixels in resolution, though the team also developed a way to scan larger objects one 4-by-4 chunk at a time.