Amazing 3-D Printed Selfie

Look at This Lady’s Amazing 3-D Printed Selfie

• BY JOSEPH FLAHERTY
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  • The first known selfie was sent in 1914, but designer Lorna Barnshaw is bringing a futuristic dimension to the process by creating self-portrait sculptures with 3-D printers. Photo: Lorna Barnshaw
  Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia shared the first known selfie in 1914 with a photo taken on Kodak Brownie camera. Today, a plethora of photo apps have made the practice commonplace, but designerLorna Barnshaw is bringing back a bit of the novelty by creating a series of self-portrait sculptures using 3-D scanning apps and printers.
  “I wanted to see how easy it was to replicate a small part of myself using only accessible tools and devices,” says Barnshaw. “Generating and materializing a digital representation of myself as though anchoring my digital existence in the physical world.”
  It looks like a fragment of a fresco recovered from the ruins of Pompeii.
  Barnshaw started her experimentation using Autodesk’s 123D Catchapp, inspired by its ability to capture dimensional data using her iPhone’s camera—and the fact that it was free and easily downloadable from the App Store. The result is the most representative in the series, and despite its thoroughly modern origins, looks like a fragment of a fresco recovered from the ruins of Pompeii.
  She then turned to the Creaform 3-D scanner, a handheld device typically used to scan industrial equipment. The resulting print looks unmistakably like a face, but gaps in the scanner’s data collection, especially around the eyes, makes it feel more clinical than artistic.
  Finally, she tried Cubify Capture, a web-based application that generates models using video data. The dark object has fragments of facial features mixed in with pixelated streaks and on whole looks more like a hiccup in a CG rendering than a documentary photo.
  
  “I wanted to explore our transition between both the material and immaterial world and the traces we leave,” says designer Lorna Barnshaw. Photo: Lorna Barnshaw
  All of the 3-D data files were printed on ZCorp 3-D printers with few changes made by the artist. “I wanted the results to be raw with little to no post-production,” says Barnshaw. “I chose to embrace the often unwanted and unpredictable glitches.”
  Many have tried 3-D printing portraiture in the past, usually by scanning faces with a Kinect and producing the models in monochrome plastic, but Barshaw believes color is a critically important to capture a true portrait. “We see and experience the world in all its color, triggering the memories and emotions that make us human,” says Barnshaw. “Color is no doubt essential when replicating a human being.”
  Even with millions of colors, the distortions introduced by the process made the portraits unrecognizable to many of her friends and generally upsetting to viewers. “We’re naturally drawn to the human face, but these generated copies seem so forbidding, they are more like death masks or discarded experiments,” she says. The collected portraits clearly illustrate just how different 3-D printing is from its 2-D counterpart.
  Barnshaw sees impromptu self-portrait photos as superior to her sculptures in some ways, despite their lack of dimensionality. “Selfies are often about that moment, environment and emotion,” says Barnshaw. “3-D prints have the advantage of a physical existence, but they lack a human touch and remain empty, stone cold faces left without social context, content and memories.”
  Still, despite lacking context and being filled with funky distortions, Barnshaw is bullish about the future of 3-D printed portraiture. “With 3-D printers, we are no-longer limited by our screens, the digital world begins to merge and integrate itself into physical existence.”
  http://www.wired.com/design/2013/11/look-out-snapchat-here-comes-the-3-d-printed-selfie/#slideid-329721