Become a Souvenir

A good friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this project the other day…and I had to share it.

Souvenirs in my view are nearly always tacky, but not these ones. If any of you have ever been to Barcelona, you’ll know La Rambla is one of the main tourist spots in the city, and that it is host to lots of stalls that sell the tackiest of tacky souvenirs. It is also host to a plethe of street performers / living statues. So, it had to be the obvious choice of location for this fantastic project – Be Your Own Souvenir from Barcelona based blablabLab.

The project uses custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks.
To create a toy soldier like souvenir of yourself. The visitors use 3 kinect sensors to create
a 360-degree scan which creates input pointclouds. Meshlab then uses these combined pointclouds
to create a Poisson reconstruction before being fed into a cnc machine which prints out the souvenir.
Check out the photos and video.

The project aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying
spaces and their own realities. The installation was enjoyed during two weekends in January 2011
by the tourists, neighbours of La Rambla and citizens of Barcelona, a city that faces a trade-off
between identity and gentrification, economic sustainability and economic growth. Nice.

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.