Little powdery people
In case you hadn’t heard, we have indeed invented the Star Trek replicator. Of course, it’s expensive, slow, and only works on solid objects, plus the results are a bit fragile. But, one step at a time, right?
A company known as FigurePrints is using this first-generation technology to sell gamers unique figurines of their World of Warcraft characters. The service is so popular that they’ve had to establish a lottery for accepting orders, even with round-the-clock production. Customers dress their characters in their favorite gear and submit the orders; the figure company retrieves (with permission) 3-D model information from Blizzard, then does a little touchup to cover gaps and clipping artifacts. In a bath of extremely fine powder, something much like an inkjet printer head sprays layers of colored glue, and after some hours, the figure is gently removed from the bath and cleaned up a bit. The result looks like the picture on the right (click it to embiggen).
So, if you play WoW, would you pay $130 for one of these? Does your character have the outfit you’d want to see it in? Would you get one if it were available for another game? Would you get one when the technology gets a little better? Expound!
Tags: gaming, star trek, technology, world of warcraft
The tech is cool, I wouldn’t waste my money though, especially not on a first-gen product. I have so many other things to spend that much (or more) on, like another VIP ticket to Duran Duran(!)
Wow, I totally thought that was a screencap until I enlarged the pic.
I’d rather see one in person before I shelled out the money, but I’d so get one in one of my really great dresses, but not really any in armor or anything.
But the price is pretty darn steep.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the potential for rapid prototyping to intersect with gaming for a few years; IMO it’s been pretty inevitable. As a note, from the rapid prototyping side, this is at least second-gen tech (first-gen didn’t have color), although there is so much divergence that it’s hard to assign clear-cut generations.
Personally, it’s a bit low-res for my tastes still, but I was never that fond of the crude detail and exaggerated proportions of “classic” miniatures, or of the cartoony look of WoW models for that matter. 3D printing is improving, though; current tech uses particles in the 50-100 micrometer range, but developments are pushing to try and get it into a range more like color laser toner, in the sub-20 micrometer range.
An interesting thought is whether this sort of tech, combined with increasing screen resolution and graphical power, will encourage future games to have more “super-res” models, possibly as an optional extra.
One of the other issues is that in some of the games I play (FF-XI in particular), the endgame equipment I wear most often includes a mix of performance-optimized items that don’t go together well visually, or in some cases are just really ugly. So do you have your character in their “work clothes”, what they’re actually in 95+% of the time adventuring and what other people associate them as looking like; or do you have them in their “town clothes” which look better visually (if you even own such) but any knowledgeable player will look at and go “hey, that’s gimp”?
What I’m most likely to use it for, is if the next gen of tech comes to the City of Heroes or Champions Online games with their powerful freeform character creator, to create versions of pen & paper characters. We’ve already been dabbling with using CoH as a visualizer for a current campaign with the intention of assembling a “group photo”.
So, needs to either come to games I play or support a general-purpose character visualizer, and I think I need some combination of better resolution and lower price to be convinced, but might splurge anyway.