If your face is just so beautiful that you can’t stand to step away from the mirror every day, a little shop in Tokyo wants to give you a new way to enjoy your impressive mug: a tiny clone. The Clone Factory uses an awesome array of technology to map out customers’ 3D images and then create small doll-sized copies of actual people. The process uses rapid prototyping, or 3D printing, to translate the 3D images into action figure-like objects in virtually no time.
The results are amazingly realistic with a high level of facial feature accuracy. These small models run $1800 each, but it isn’t hard to imagine a market for life-size versions in the near future. We shudder to think how much those might cost. But just like in the movie Surrogates, humanoid robotic doubles might one day be the way we relate to the physical world without the fear of damage to our biological bodies…and this could just be the start.
