Digitally Peeking Inside a Pack of Pokemon Cards

By the way, this is patent pending --- for trading cards in general. If you're interested in partnering, please contact me. (End of description)

So yeah. This is something I've been working on for a long time. And was really on the fence about whether or not to keep a secret --- the immediate instinct many people have, along with whether this works for scratch-off lottery tickets (no), is to buy packs, look inside, and keep just the good ones. This is really, really icky, and part of what inspired me to apply for a patent (and then keep it secret while I figured out what to do). If you have an X-ray CT scanner, there's nothing stopping you from doing this for yourself, but if you care at all about patents, you can't go ahead and start doing it at scale or as a service.

That's really how I imagine this - as a service. For the most valuable of packs at first, and then expanding as the technique gets refined. CGC or PSA can grade your card, but doing so while keeping it fresh in the pack? That's new, and I think it's cool! Building trust would be difficult at first, but maybe a few choice packs sent off to livestreamers could fix that?

Here's the post I just put out for this on Hackaday: https://hackaday.io/project/191395-x-...

Tons more information about the CT scanner thing there, if you're interested. The time is right for buying one and being able to do this for yourself, I did that, and so the time was ripe also for someone else independently discovering that this was possible, which they did. I just wasn't expecting it to be so soon --- my machine is from 2003, so this has been possible for decades.

Big thanks to Ryan Chesler (https://www.kaggle.com/ryches) for providing the best looking model at 7:18!

August followup video - anti-scanning:    • How to Discourage CT Scanning - for T...  

Contact me at my first and last name @gmail.com, no spaces. If you wouldn't mind, please specify in the subject line if this is to nerd out about the science, partner, you want to scan your own packs, send a death threat or other.