Shoppers at Ohio’s Dayton mall will soon be able to get 3D, full-body selfies, courtesy of Artec Group and Doppelganger Laboraties. The tech developers have built a photo booth that uses four high-resolution, rotating cameras to capture images of a person standing inside it, and then compiles a full-body 3D image out of those scans. It will then use 3D printing to produce a figurine of that person called a “Shapie”, which the customer can pick up the next day. The product is set to make its debut in Ohio’s Dayton Mall this week.
Artec Group and Doppelganger Laboratories are hoping this kind of thing will catch on in a broad cultural context. In a press release, they stated that “‘Shapies’ are the next generation way to capture life’s special moments like weddings, pregnancies and graduations.”
Artec’s CEO, Artyom Yukhin, commented further that while this kind of technology “is seen in the news on a daily basis, it is not yet widely within reach of the average person,” adding that his company hopes “that the Shapify Booth can change this by becoming many people’s first interaction with 3D technologies.”
The product is notable for brining advanced biometric technology into the world of everyday social recreation. While biometric technology has profound applications in the worlds of security and medical science, it also has some novel uses in everyday life, and has already found its way into comedy clubs in Spain and will soon be installed in retail stores to provide virtual fittings for eyewear and other such products.
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November 17, by Alex Perala
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