fabricate yourself
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Fabricate Yourself Kinect hack turns you into a 3D puzzle piece
We've been whittling our likeness into bars of soap for decades, but lucky for us someone's come up with a far easier way to render our flawless good looks in miniature. Following in a long line of inventive Kinect hacks, the folks at Interactive Fabrication have produced a program called Fabricate Yourself that enlists the machine to capture images of users and convert them into 3D printable files. The hack, which was presented at Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference in January, results in tiny 3D models that resemble Han Solo trapped in carbonite and sport jigsaw edges that can be used to make a grid of small, but accurate renderings. Fabricate Yourself is still in its infancy, and the resulting models are relatively short on detail, but we're no less excited by the possibilities -- just think of all the things we could monogram in the time it takes to produce one soapy statuette. Video after the jump.
Kinect plus 3D printing equals instant miniature you
Thanks to an inventive, and kind of bizarre, project, people have immortalized themselves as Kinect sees them. The Fabricate Yourself project uses 3D models captured by Kinect as the basis for a 3D-printed figure. Designer Karl D.D. Willis came up with the project as an interactive installation for the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction conference. Attendees's shapes were captured by Kinect, and then turned into pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. But the implications are larger than just a cool thing at a conference. As 3D printers become cheaper, it will be possible for more people to use this technology to take 3D snapshots as if they were taking Polaroids. It will also be possible to make a tiny action-figure version of yourself to fight with the Hulk. Not that we, as totally mature adults, have any interest in such a thing, of course.
