Be Your Own Souvenir – Hey, I had that idea!

A while ago I had an idea that goes roughly like this: you open a shop in some location with lots of tourists – maybe in the Mall of America or in a place like Estes Park, CO – the type of place where people are in a spending mood and have those cheesey “Old-Timey Photos” taken.  In this shop visitors could pose to have a statue of them made. You’d scan them with some sort of 3D scanner and then a custom 3D CNC mill would carve a wooden statue of them while they watch (behind some safety glass). Your setup might even have software that allows them to puff-up their muscles like a super hero, maybe make their belly look a bit more six-pack-ish, make balds spots disappear and so on.   You might sell the small statues fairly cheap, but charge a lot more for large, living room fixture-type statues.  What mother wouldn’t want some little wood-carved statues of her children for the mantle?  It’s a slam dunk.

I first documented this idea back in late 2009.  I did some research into off-the-shelf 3D scanning technologies(expensive!), 3D printing (expensive!), and 3D CNC technologies (expensive!).   I looked at a few college projects for simple 3D scanners that had been posted online, I developed plans for pseudo-3D by combining DIY CNC with a lathe.  Because most of this stuff is so far outside my areas of expertise (and also because most of the people I told the idea to seemed to think it was kind of lame) I gave the idea a fairly low priority – so far all I’ve done with it is bookmark a lot of web pages and make a lot of sketches.

Then the other day I stumbled on this video. Basically it’s my idea brought to life.

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.

So here’s the thing about ideas. Everyone has ideas. With billions of people on the planet it’s inevitable that for any half-way decent idea, thousands of people will come up with it independently. But for some reason that’s not the way we prefer to think about ideas – Edison alone invented the lightbulb (not really true), Bell alone invented the telephone (also not true), only one person can have an idea and everyone else is a copycat.

The funny thing is, the truly difficult part of any idea is making it happen.  An idea doesn’t just turn into a prototype, it takes a lot of time, perseverance, and hard work.  So my hat is off to the guys at blablabLAB for making this idea happen.  But not so much for the idea itself, any jackass could have come up with that.