Art Installation Lets You Be Your Own Souvenir

3d_souvenir_printer

The team at [blablabLAB] have been hard at work on their latest project, which they unleashed on the streets of Barcelona in the La Rambla pedestrian mall. Their art installation allows you to pose in the middle of the mall and receive a plastic statue of yourself as a souvenir.

Not unlike the “Fabricate Yourself” installation we saw a short time ago, this project also uses the Kinect to create a 3D representation of the subject, though it uses three separate sensors rather than just one. Each sensor is positioned around a centralized platform, creating a complete 3D model, which is then sent to a RapMan 3D printer stationed nearby.

Each user is then gifted a plastic representation of themselves to take home – it’s almost like an interactive human Mold-A-Rama. While the figures are neat, it would be great to see what sorts of plastic statues could be made using a higher resolution 3D printer like the one we featured a week ago.

Check out the video below to see the souvenir printer in action.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/21676294 w=470]

17 thoughts on “Art Installation Lets You Be Your Own Souvenir

  1. This is just too cool. I can think of several people I’d like to have stand there just so I could have a totally unique memento of that person.
    Plus I could have a totally unique chess set using friends as players…

  2. @rusty considering each of the 3 kinects cost $200 and a 3d plotter like that will run you anywhere from $300-2000 depending on if they had parts for a cnc to start with or built a reprap from scratch, it was probably pretty expensive.

    any idea how long those actually took to print? even with a fairly low resolution that video had to be speed up

  3. I hope someone builds a high resolution Kinect like device soon. That would open up endless possibilities in science and media.
    It would be a good thing to have full surround real time 3D support built in. Like light filters for color multiplexing of the depth information. Well it seems to allready work pretty good without it though.
    I wonder how long it will take until I can get a high resolution, full color, 3D print of myself for a reasonable price (meaning one that I can actually afford) generated by a similar device. Something like that should be in every major city (at least).

  4. @andrew – I was going to ask the same question. All I can think of is either they changed the IR frequency of the other two or they have them on 10fps each in a rotated fashion..

  5. @ Hackius – exactly! a pitty since the resolution of a rapman is incredible, and the kinect can do real time scanning…
    @ rusty – the souvenirs were given for free. the installation was about making people participate and also about creating wareness around the new pervasive technologies. we made them sign we agreed on beeing 3d scanned
    @ adam – the print of teh figures averaged 10-15 minutes with a rapman 3.1
    @ Tea – i recommend you researching for structured -light algorithms… the kinect its not the best but the easiest (and cheapest!) of the setups. this installation planned to use Build Your Own 3D Scanner before the kinect came out.
    @ andrew – because of the geometric setup they only overlap at some small areas of the body. anyway we used sequenced mechanic shutters to avoid the interferences.

    thanks for your comments!

    1. Hello blablaLAB, I really want to build/develop this setup. As a matter of fact I am 1 kinect (and I believe lots of coding :)) short of it.To teach kids about all these new tech I buld a slightly over sized rotating platform but th eissue is people tend to topple, some can’t keep balance while scanning and that tends to discourage them. I really wish to build this setup. Thank you for showcasing you work. Could you suggest me how do I capture 3 kinect at once. Books I can study, Code that I can build upon?

  6. Kinda sloppy 3D printing, but for the reprap, I can see why. Hopefully some of the issues get worked out, I suggested to someone that they heat the work space so everything cools uniformly and not warp, not just the base.

    Cheers.

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