“This isn’t an artistic likeness of the president ... This is actually millions upon millions of measurements that create a 3D likeness that we can now 3D print — and make something that’s never been done before.”
This President Abraham Lincoln plaster cast from April 1860 was the inspiration for the digital face scan
This news passed me by when it came out in December 2014, but its a remarkable testament to how far the development of digital humans has come. Barack Obama became the first US President to have his likeness digitally scanned and 3D-printed. Inspired by the plaster casts of President Lincoln, Adam Metallo and Vincent Rossi conceived of the project to digitally represent Obama, which was lead by Günter Waibel, Director of the Smithsonian 3D Digitization Program Office.
The process used a mobile version of Paul Debevec's Lightstage technology, which uses an array of 50 lights and 8 DSLRs to capture 80 photographs in a range of lighting in under 1 second. This quickly capture vast detail and lighting information from a subject's face. Lightstage has been used to create digital faces for a number of Hollywood films including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar, and Debevec and his team won a Scientific and Engineering Award (a scientific Oscar) for the Lightstage.
The Lightstage data was augmented with data from hand-held digital scanners, which were able to fill in the missing data from the back of the President's head. The entire process of digital capture took just 7 minutes, which is even more impressive when you consider that it took 15 minutes for the plaster to dry on Lincon's face. Of course, the real work started once they left the White House. The different data sets needed to be combined into a unified space and then optimized into a 15 million polygon model ready for 3D printing.
The files were then transferred to 3D Systems, who used a process called Selective Laser Sintering to print a highly detailed 1:1 scale bust of President Obama over 42 hours. The bust is now on display in the Smithsonian museum in Washington.
