Fabricate Yourself by Karl D.D. Willis of Interactive Fabrication
Fabricate Yourself is the latest project by Interactive Fabrication for the 2011 the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference uses the Microsoft Kinect as a 3D scanner to then generate STL files for 3D printing…
In November 2010, Adafruit Industries offered a bounty for an open-source driver for Kinect (Thanks to Johnny Lee) which has led to some awesome projects but this is the first to our knowledge to incorporate the 3D depth map for 3D printing, software developed using openFrameworks open source C++ toolkit.
To print at the 3x3cm size they only needed to use one quarter of the full Kinect resolution, below is a full resolution scan, The holes are due to occlusion of the projected IR light and general depth camera noise. This is obviously a very early iteration of something we are sure to see more of, possibly with two Kinects used simultaneously someone will be able to remove the ‘shadow’ to get a full 3D scan of an object which will be an awesome way to make 3D printing more accessibe for repair jobs, to copy and modify existing objects, to reduce the CAD barrier and it just looks like fun…. I do hope he releases the code..
Karl D.D. Willis also brought us the Beautiful Modeler which used the iPad as a 3D modeling interface including tilt control and multi-touch.. For video of the Fabricate Yourself project read on…