Kinect and 3D printer turns people into action-figure souvenirs

Barcelona's Blablablab set up a "Be Your Own Souvenir installation that used a Kinect and a 3D printer to allow passersby to pose for on-demand action-figures of themselves and their night out on the town: "The project uses custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks. To create an army figurine style souvenir, visitors use 3 kinect sensors to create a 360-degree scan which creates input pointclouds. Meshlab then uses these combined pointclouds to create a Poisson reconstruction, which is cleaned up via Blender and Skeinforge before being fed into a cnc machine (Rapman 3.1), which prints out the souvenir. Voila! Now, seriously, check out the pics and video of it in action on the next page!"

Be Your Own Souvenir by blablabLAB - 04.08.11 (via Geisha Asobi)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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PDXgirl

First it was the cheese fountain, then the photo booth. The next big thing to hit wedding receptions: Self Portrait Figurines! (I’ve always wondered what my army men looked like when they were drunk.)
- lyd
  
  Self Portrait Figurines… MADE OF CHEESE!
Susan Oliver

want want want
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

I’m sure I’m not the first person to think this, but this would be wonderful for making your own D&D figures. You could just pose, or create a rough sculpture, and then print as many figurines as you need.
davejenk1ns

A great concept, but can we please turn down the artiste doublespeak?
“under-laying spaces and their own realities”? “a trade-off between identity and gentrification”? “technological ritual”?

And again:
“The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.”

I once dated an architecture student, and she was very conflicted– she was smart and creative, and wanted to express herself through “space”, but also realized that ultimately it’s about function and usability. I always suspected that the overuse of words like “space” and “identity” and “subtext” in art and architecture were meant as a sort of intellectual barrier. I don’t doubt the artists and architects actually believe in this, I am just saying that it’s needlessly over-complex in trying to communicate something.

They’d get a lot further by opening a booth in Times Square and charging $10 per figurine.
- osmo
  
  … why dont you open that booth and those people keep at recreating futures?
  
  Its not about making cash, what engineers never get is why no one likes their ideas and what artists can’t grasp is why people never use theirs. So why not relax yourself and perhaps copypasta this and use it on your own? Improve it, change it and fix it. You rock, they rock, we rock.
- Anonymous
  
  haha!
  you are completly right!
  but please, understand it was meant for artists and architects!
  (also for myself, as one of them ;D)
  blablabLAB
Eugene

Amazing. First time I see a 3D-printer! Cheese? Why not?
Bloo

Holy Sintered Layers, Batman! I _just_ finished the section of “Makers” where the little kids offer Sammy a souvenir bust of his head.

Is it a special kind of singularity when reality catches up to science fiction and passes it?
shenzahn

What’s the song in the video?
- ariel
  
  The song is Ambling Alp by Yeasayer.
Anonymous

these look like figurines….not action figures.