Well quite some years back I got called into a company that did foot scanning. They used optical scanners and they were fast. I could well see this pin scanner being like a whole bunch of motorised calipers and each one sending serial data back about its position. The trick is getting constant force on whatever tip each pin has, alot of contact/needle scanners ring the pin with a piezo element, this gets damped the moment it contacts producing a very repeatable result.
The company I did the work for had two very expensive machines to make specialist insoles, the two companies who made the equipment had fallen out and made the equipment unusable. I solved the problem with Rhino allowing the scanned data to be manipulated and converted to a format the milling machine could handle. In the process I also improved the quality of their scans. Example below, one on the right has noise reduction via Rhino that had been present in all the scans and insoles upto that point. The solution was also 4 figure fix than the 5-6 figure number they got quoted. That was some 15yrs ago.
