Oh I agree with you on all those points. That's one of the main thrusts of my work as well. It's hard, but doable, and if you've gone through the effort then you might as well leverage it with a technique such as this.
I think so. You don't need a 3D artist -- models can also be created with a 3D scanner.
I also don't think (I haven't read the paper, yet!) you need to do anything to get the semantic sliders other than to label existing data. If you're going to design a single chair, it's probably more time efficient to have an artist make a 3D model to your specifications. On the other hand, if you're going to design something like a customized biomedical part with variations that depend upon the patient, then this could easily be a net win. Not to mention if you'd like to automate that design, you now have a much smaller dimensional parameter space to play with.
When you scan a document, it produces a two-dimensional image. This is producing a traversable three dimensional space. It's a very different problem for so many reasons, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same fidelity in the result in the near future.
Yes. The thing that sticks out the most to me is the poor treatment of edges. One possible reason the edges look bad is that meshing algorithms that take into account sharp edges can produce unrealistic mesh topologies that are difficult to work with. Bad mesh topologies can wreak havoc on some operations like texture mapping, which they obviously use quite heavily. There are algorithms that can clean this up, but it is a messy and computationally intensive business.
Or it could just be poor data from the scanner -- that would be unfortunate. Some of the artifacts are so bad that it would seem to suggest that this is the case (the corner of the countertop in the kitchen is quite bad, or the protrusion in the wall above the entry-way into the kitchen, for some examples). It's hard to tell from looking at the processed result. I wonder what the raw scans look like.
Very cool product though, even if it's rough right now. I can see this looking nice in the future.
Something I've noticed in some large cross-platform (Windows, Linux) C++ projects I've been involved in is that the developers, given the choice, will just as often choose to work in Windows. Visual Studio is an incredibly powerful IDE.
I've used delhanty's example in a large codebase and it worked well.
Another approach is to create a static library that overloads global memory operators (new, delete, and their variations). Link this static library to every DLL that you make, and have the implementation of these overloaded global memory operators use the heap of a single DLL. There may still be multiple heaps, but only one will be used.
Sure there is. The second law of thermodynamics (which I am assuming you are referring to) only applies to an isolated system and describes its tendency toward thermal equilibrium -- it doesn't apply when you are able to add energy to the system.