specimen · renato.design

specimen is a 3D scanning app for iPhone that treats the captured object as a specimen — worth describing, worth situating, worth demystifying. You point the phone at a thing. You walk around it. You flip it over. You capture the bottom. The app produces a mesh you can open in Rhino, Blender, or any 3D software. Witness describes what was captured in clinical language. A registrar's voice. Surface reads as glazed ceramic. Bottom not captured. Approximately fourteen centimeters across. Afterwords is six voices from the dead. Sōetsu Yanagi speaks on the beauty of humble objects. Walter Benjamin speaks on what scanning itself is — what aura means when an object is captured. D'Arcy Thompson speaks on the forces that made the form. Roland Barthes speaks on the detail that pierces the viewer. George Kubler speaks on where this object sits in its class. Vilém Flusser speaks on the gesture of capture. Concordance names the mechanism, not the marketing term. Light detection and ranging. Infrared pulses. Time of flight. Structured light. Photogrammetry. Triangulation. Exports in millimeters, Z-up — the Rhino-default design-studio convention. Switchable to inches for the truly stubborn or architects among you. Share a capture package as a .zip and AirDrop it to a Mac running the free specimen Companion for full-detail reconstruction Apple only exposes on macOS. Requirements: iPhone with LiDAR (iPhone 12 Pro or later Pro / Pro Max). Apple Intelligence–capable device if you want the voices to speak on-device; the app falls back cleanly otherwise. No cloud. No account. No credits. No subscription. Built for students and makers as a tool for contemplative work. specimen is part of renato.design, a creative research practice authored through Iterative LLM Co-Authorship — a collaboration between Phil Renato and Claude (Anthropic). Released as a research artifact, not commercial software. See the disclaimer in Settings → About for details.