Virtual characters get a real personality

That there are millions of takers for video games is a given. Not just children, but even grown-ups can be seen glued to their play stations. Often they wish for their video game characters to come alive and stand before them. And the news is that a dream that seemed far-fetched some years ago is a reality today. Computer scientists from Harvard have developed a software that helps turn video game characters into real-life figures, using a 3D printer.

The software made by the computer scientists and graphics experts from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Technische Universität Berlin, and Cornell University enables the video game characters and three dimensional animations into 3D printed, fully-articulated toys which come out fully assembled. The developers say that this three dimensional printer can also easily print anatomically unbalanced creatures. It creates objects layer-by-layer using materials such as plastic, wood or chocolate.

The printer works by examining an animated character’s virtual behaviour, and figuring out ideal locations for their actual joints. Then it builds a 3-D computer model of the joints’ best locations and physical attributes. The software even has the capacity to build some friction into the joints - which can be ball-and-socket joints or hinges.

One advantage of the imaginary world is that characters and animation can take any form as there is no laws of physics, but it is impossible to apply the same in the real world. So it means making toys from some video game characters could be problematic, because the real world may render them incapable of standing up or their giant one-arm may mean they can’t balance properly.

The new software tackles this problem by using optimisation techniques and the researchers showed it is possible by printing the characters from the game Spore. The printer can also optimise skin textures by analysing the way light gets reflected off the virtual skin. The software now can print a static scene, just a character in one stance. But it’s not too long before soft-bodied action figures will start popping out of a 3-D printer.