Mini Me

Tired of that old purikura? Those eye-widening pictures that make you look like you are perpetually 12 with cute little designs all over it or those stickers and giving yourself cat faces and ears just not cutting it?

Well thank god Japan is ahead of its game in technology.
Recently, I watched a television show about how they could make remarkably accurate replicas of their fake food. In the show, they used a 3D imager to take a massive print of a cantaloupe melon. They then used the same software to somehow make an exact replica of it in plastics. The show was actually a pretty remarkable one where two people were competing to make the most accurate melons as possible in order to fool a professional judge when compared against 8 other melons that were real. The judge was able to narrow it down to the last 3 and then gave up. In any case, it is this kind of technology, the 3D imaging and replicating of the artifact, that lead to this very innovation to the purikura market.
Now, you can have your very own you...as an action figure!!! Sweet right!? OK well it is more of a figurine, but it is still pretty sweet. You see, you go in for a nice 3D picture and then they will shrink the image into a size of your choice for your very own you-figurine. Only, you can't make a model in a day. The whole process takes about a month, so you have to stay in that position for an incredibly long time and they have to hook feeding tubes up and stuff.

....Right, so it is not that long. It is a long enough time (15 minutes) that they are concerned about your ability to hold a pose still enough for the imaging software to be able to accurately capture it. As for the mini model, now that will take some time. That process should be somewhere around a month give or take some change. And then of course they will mail you the final model.

Still the whole thing is pretty awesome. A total advance to the world of self-righteous egoists and others, who just want their picture taken. Imagine in a few years being able to go to a booth and get this whole process done in half an hour and out comes in the little drop box, a mini you. Or imagine with their buy in bulk option, a politician handing out mini action figures of himself for his campaign. Or a movie campaign for Marvel or something like Kickass, handing out their super heroes in Happy Meals and such....ok so they have those, but not in this detail (eye wrinkles! they can capture your eye wrinkles!....who wants to see oneself portrayed with eye wrinkles...?)...and not with YOU in the costume. Now that would make it much cooler.

source:
http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/15/3-d-photo-booth-makes-a-miniature-you/?hpt=hp_c3

Say Cheese!

There is a remarkably popular invention called the "purikura". Otherwise known as the Print Club (puri meaning print and kura meaning club, thus print club).

In America, I always saw these as a charming little addition to any T.V. drama special. Don't know what I mean? Just look at a good lot of the girly dramas, particularly the older ones when the fad was more popular, but even new one such as Pretty Little Liars (no, I don't watch this) feature the overused cliches of photo booths. This fascination with photo booths is primarily focused in bigger cities such as New York and Los Angeles, as they are bigger cultural melting pots with a much more hip type of crowd. They are also of course found in Asia. All over it in fact. But mostly in the idol and photography obsessed areas of Korea and Japan.
Now being an actual living being that is not on a T.V. set, I never actually saw one of these things in America. I am going out on a limb assuming they can be found in popular city centers.
I was first introduced to it in Korea. Where they have little shops devoted to it. And I do mean little, I think my neighbor has a bigger walk-in closet than these shops. In it I found the stickers of happy smiling patrons all around, counters, ceilings, windows, booths. That's right. These pics are more than meets the eye, they can be stickers too. Being new to this whole experience, I don't actually recall much of my first experience. Just that I have the itty bitty smiling faces on photo film as proof of it. It was rather overwhelming. Smile! Pose! Snap! Next! Snap! Snap! Snap!
The boom of these purikura photos hit its peak about 10 years back. Wherein you would have to stand in line to take your pictures. For this reason the machine developers instated time limits when selecting features in order to meet their supply and demand and of course make money. In some areas you can still find a line outside these booths on a tipsy summer night with some girl friends in the city.  But for the most part the fad has faded a bit. This does not prevent my students from having their textbooks covered in the little stickers.

The booth exterior, the booth interior, and the outcome ( after fun-time in the editing room of course).