MakerBot Industries

Doesn’t that look like fun?!  The Fabricate Yourself project used a Kinect to capture 3D images of attendees that were then converted to STL’s on dovetail joint blocks and then 3D printed at the TEI 2011 conference!¹

Fabricate Yourself is a project that documented the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference. Usually we think of documentation in terms of text, photography and video, but given the tangible theme of the conference we decided to engage the community by capturing and fabricating small 3D models of attendees. This enabled us to build a tangible model of the event and fabricate it piece by piece during the conference.

I could totally imagine a future with 3D photo booths that print out a printed plastic block with a 3D rendering of the booth’s occupants.  Or what about a souvenir from your favorite theme park – you could get a printed model of yourself cringing in the seat of a roller coaster instead of just a picture!

1. Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction [↩]