One of the parents of a friend of Dyson’s started up a company called PocketMe to do 3D portraits. It’s a pretty cool setup. You go to their shop in Berkeley and stand in a cylindrical enclosure surrounded by a bunch of cameras, which all take a picture simultaneously. Then they process it, 3d print it out, and a couple weeks later, you get a little figure of you.

Dyson and I stopped by and did a session and now we have little mini versions of us! They’re very cute. If you happen to be in the area, check them out. They take appointments 7 days a week but they also do drop-ins on Saturday from 1-5pm.

They give you digital versions of the models, too! If you click on the models below, you can actually rotate them around.

Last week, I attended SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, a conference on computer graphics. One of the fun things I did was to give a brief talk at the RenderMan Art & Science Fair on using RenderMan to create images for virtual reality. I’ve given similar talks before, but usually for an audience of a few hundred and this one was for nearly 2000. So that was pretty exciting.

People seemed to enjoy my talk and afterwards, someone even wrote an article on uploadvr.com about it! And then someone in France (who wasn’t even there) wrote a French article on frandroid.com about the first article. And now I’m blogging about an article about an article about a talk that I gave last week. So meta. Oh, and there was a Reddit post about the article, too. It’s been a busy week keeping up with everything on top of work!

Anyways, the talk was about a pretty simple idea that other people have implemented before on various platforms, but I hadn’t seen any public information on how to do it for RenderMan so that’s what lead to the talk. You can read all about it on the RenderMan forums. Or you can just download the materials from the talk from this Google Drive folder.