Action figures come to life
Watch out, Barbie: Omnivorous beasts are assembling in a 3-D printer near you. A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters — or any other three-dimensional animations — into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3-D printer. The project is described in detail in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics and will be presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference on Aug. 7. In addition to its obvious consumer appeal, the tool constitutes a remarkable piece of code and an unusual conceptual exploration of the virtual and physical worlds. “In animation you’re not necessarily trying to model the physical world perfectly; the model only has to be good enough to convince your eye,” explains lead author Moritz Bächer, a graduate student in computer science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS)....