DentSight

Every paintless dent technician learns to read a reflection. The light board's stripes bend where the metal is low and pinch where it is high, and after enough years your eye turns that bending into a picture of the panel. DentSight is an attempt to give that picture to a camera and hand it back to you on the metal itself, in real time.

How it works

• An iPhone sits in front of the panel where your eye would be, looking at your ordinary PDR light reflected in the paint.
• From a single frame of that reflection the software computes a height map: red where the metal is high, blue where it is low, refreshed several times a second.
• You wear a Meta Quest in passthrough. The map floats on the panel, circled and marked with the body lines you draw, and it changes as you push from behind.
• Nothing leaves the shop. The phone and the headset talk to each other over your own Wi-Fi with a pairing code; there is no cloud in the loop, so it works with no internet at all.

Where it stands

DentSight is a working prototype. The mathematics holds up on synthetic dents and in a scripted demonstration; the headset app installs and runs; the phone-as-camera step is built. What remains is the part that only a real panel, a real light and a real repair can prove. It is not for sale yet. The plan is to fold it into the Dent Repair USA app as a free feature once it earns its place, and to design purpose-built hardware only after the software has.

The reasoning behind it, and the questions a technician actually needs answered while pushing, come from my book The Physics of Paintless Dent Repair.