Rik Abel

So I had this brilliant idea on the train this morning. Really, it’s brilliant. You may be aware that you can now get your body 3D-scanned at a walk-in booth - I think Levi’s had a concession at Selfridges or somewhere for custom-fitting jeans. I figure that this means these scanners can’t be THAT expensive to rent. So what you do is, you hook up one of these scanners to a 3D printing machine, as are now definitely commercially available. You see where I’m going with this? Within minutes you can have an accurate, scale model replica of yourself! In durable ABS plastic! How cool is that? It’s very cool, that’s how cool it is. All it needs is a name. MiniMe immediately springs to mind, but may not be usable seeing as Mike Myers thought of it first. Any other suggestions?

A number of scenarios immediately spring to mind as to why you might want scale model replicas of yourself, and why it would be good:

• you can give one to your partner so that they can always have a small plastic version of you. You could even do a keyring-sized version, sort of like Qees. These could me called KEY-MEs, maybe?
• (Part of the fun would be customising your MiniMe, that is to say painting the white plastic ABS with model paints, or something. Some geeky people seem to enjoy that sort of thing, the type of people who play miniature war games maybe, but it could catch on…)
• you could have a series of MiniMes made over the course of your lifetime and then create a depressing diorama of your inevitable decline on your mantelpiece. Sort of like that evolution-of-man sequence, only backwards. And 3D.
• It would hopefully lead to the demise of Madame Tussauds and their scary waxworks, which all too often fall slap bang in the middle of ‘uncanny valley‘.
• There may well be medical applications. Maybe they (doctors and clever scientists) are already fabrication perfectly fitting artificial hip joints (say) by doing full-body scans with an fMRI machine (or whatever is cutting edge these days) and then printing the files for your bones. Wow, eh? Why not make a backup of yourself while you are healthy then you can print out whatever you want. A model of your spleen? Why not! Who cares if it is useful.
• If you’ve got enough cash and when the printers get big enough you can do a full-size version of yourself. Or loads of them for a mad and slightly worrying terracotta army of you. Meanwhile with the current size printers I imagine you could still create a full size version of you by just printing out a bunch of slices and then sticking them all together.
• the plastic surgery applications are pretty exciting - scan your head, tweak it with 3D software, print out an ideal version of you for evaluation. Or print your head and fix it to a hunting trophy style plaque and fix it to your living room wall
• How about scanning a bunch of famous footballers for a custom table football table? That would be sweet.
• I could go on, but you get the drift…

I’m sure there are myriad other applications, sensible and ludicrous. This is a winner, eh? Feel free to offer other ideas. I’m not sure how the economics work out - I’d imagine the scanning machine hire ain’t THAT cheap - and you’d have to physically go to a booth and get scanned, which cuts down on the maximum throughput, but surely the technology will get smaller and cheaper. I wonder what the Dragon’s Den people would think?

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