Ever wondered how your own 3D avatar would look like for real? With James Cameron's movie "Avatar", 3D is becoming very popular and numerous Hollywood productions are going 3D these days. But these are movies, and all of us can only dream about having a 3D avatar and watching him as a separate entity.

Now we have made a really surprising experience at one of our local Dassault-Systemes 2010 Kick-Offs. In order to get a closer look to what's 3D, two of our Partners came with their hardware . They took a 3D picture of all of those not afraid to do so (no, no, there is no risk with 3D pictures!!) and then printed them in 3D.
How does it work?

Getting a 3D picture of your face

Noomeo's 3D scanner named Optinum goes around you in order to scan your face. You can see it in real time on a laptop. Numisoft is the software that reconstruct your 3D face in the computer so that there is no "hole" in your 3D model.

In this picture you can see Pierric Le Quement from Noomeo scanning our boss Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault-Systemes.

Printing your face in 3D

The model information is sent to Objet's software in order to put together several 3D faces before sending them to Objet's 3D printer. So OK we have there several faces, but this is not mass production! Wink: Michael from Objet has highlighted my face in blue

Now Objet's 3D printer from the Connex Family is starting to build our faces in 3D, layer by layer (see the blue light on the left picture). When finished printing, we get nice 3D faces on a Business Card size (see right picture)

Here we are, everybody's got its 3D badge?
Your host proudly presenting its 3D trophy as a badge, with Michael Anton from Objet on the back. You can also see the Connex 3D printer on the left, not so big for such a machine, isn't it?

Well, the show is over now. I'm pretty sure that this kind of process will become straightforward in the future and that everybody will be able to have a physical 3D snapshot of its face soon.
I can tell you that it's really a strange feeling to watch ourself "from outside" in our hands! Only rich and famous people get their Portrait bust today, but it will not take long to share 3D faces on Facebook with your friends! 3D will be a reality for all very soon.

What was funny afterward was that male were happy just because they could watch themselves in 3D, while (some of) our female colleagues were eventually disappointed when seeing themselves without nice lightening on cosmetics... Well, we still have some work to do before our avatars are close to reality. Hopefully we can dream with 3D movie avatars in the meanwhile!

What's your view on the 3D scan & 3D print benefits? do you know any integrated business in this domain? Would you consider this can reach mass-market for consumers? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this topic.

PS: Great thanks to Pierric from Noomeo and to Michael from Objet, they could make this happen.

Jacques