The UK supermarket chain, Asda, is currently trailing 3D in-store printing of mini-me figurines. Cost: £ 40 (€ 47 or $Aus 67 or $USA 64)
Customers can buy 3D coloured versions of any person or object including the family car or dog (if Trixy can keep still for 2 mins) scaled down to an 8-inch figure.
Now you too can play games with yourself. (Warning: Avoid wording involving ‘play with’ and ‘yourself’.)
It takes two minutes using a hand-held scanner to create the 3D image and 6 – 8 hours for the 3D printer to produce the figure.
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The Virtual You
3D body scanning already exists so you can create a 1:1 scale avatar (A Mevatar, perhaps?) of youself for online shopping. By combining this technology with 3D printing the scaled-down Mini Me concept was born.
YOu can walk your personal exact-scale Avatar into an online shop and try on clothes!
3D PRINTING: THE MATHS
Maths is involved at every stage of the Mini Me production to produce the scanner, the scanner program, the printer and the printer program.
It is the scale that is intriguing.
The scale used by the 3D printer is approx 1:10 ratio.
What?
According to the BBC average man in England is 5ft 9in (175.3cm) tall and weighed 13.16 stone (83.6kg) and woman is 11 stone (70.2kg) and 5ft 3in tall (161.6cm).
3D printers use materials from brass to silver to ceramics so figurines can be quite heavy. Assuming the ceramic material has a similar density to the human body, the 1:10 scale male figurine would weight over 1 stone (8 kg) and a female 1 stone plus (7 kg)!
Will shoppers be staggering home in York carrying 7kg figurines?????
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Wait a minute:
- 1:10 scale along each axis produces an overall scale of 1:1,000
Mini Me Mathspig is just 1/1,000 of Big Mathspig
or one little cube in the pack of 1,000.
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The supermarket figurine @ 1:1,000 scale by volume (and, assuming, weight too) would weight 83 gm ( 3 ounces) for men and 70 gm (2.5 ounces) for women. That’s more like it. The figurines will be, in fact, a little heavier as customers will be scanned wearing clothes and shoes, we hope, or the scanning sessions at the supermarket will be really weird.
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What next?
How about your face on a Star Trek Figurine?
Done. See Engadget.
Yes, mathpiggies, we want maths to boldly go where no maths has gone before ……
