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Harvard Software 3D Prints Articulated Action Figures
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article at Geek.com "A team of computer scientists at Harvard University have developed a piece of software that allows anyone to 3D print their own action figures at home. Not only will the models carry the likeness of the character, they will also be fully articulated. The software can take an animated 3D character and figure out where best to place its joints. In what is referred to as reverse rendering, the software first looks at an animated character's shape and movement and identifies the best joint points (original paper, paywalled). It then adjusts the size of the different parts of the model so as to allow a real joint to work once printed. Optimizations are then carried out to produce a model as close as possible to the on-screen version, but at the same time workable as an actual real-world, articulated 3D model."
The bad news: Harvard is patenting everything and wants to commercialize it on a proprietary basis. The good news: An anonymous reader pointed toward the paper in full.
My very own Evil Wil Wheaton action figure can be a reality!
"The bad news: Harvard is patenting everything and wants to commercialize it on a proprietary basis." So tired of this. I get it, but I'm tired of it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So how would the AFAA (Action Figure Association of America) implement some kind of DRM on action figures anyways? Would they try to force a blacklist of designs onto every 3d printer? Too bad for them the first thing I'm printing out is an army of pirates.
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"Anyone at home" is an interesting take on that. Just how many people have a 3D printer in their home? A tiny number I would think.
That's a serious question, how many?
Or you could look at it as another labor-intensive job that humans don't have to do anymore. Unless they really want to.
So they're patenting some math.
Here is a legal analysis of the situation:
The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing
It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:
It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provides legal opinion why personal printing is largely immune to it all.
Of course this means very little in the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything or for nothing.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra