Found a site that shows how you can make your own 3d scanner, using just a laser pointer, wine glass, rotating platform, and a digital video camera. Which seems great if you need to get a digital model of something in a pinch.

The stem of the wine class diffracts the light so that it creates a beam along the surface of the object that is being scanned on the rotating platform. As the object rotates, the camera then records change in the line that the diffracted laser makes. Using an edge detection algorithm on the video avi to find the location of the laser line, reconstructs a 3-D model that looks like this:

It’s not the highest quality scan, but it’s a quick cheap alternative if nothing else is around and you’re forced to Macgyver a solution.

Link to the tutorial

Link to a similar, but more in depth scanner