How Canon Helps Create 3D Selfies

Selftraits lets you see yourself in miniature form.

Imagine staring down a five-inch version of yourself. The ability to do so is literally right in the palm of your hand.

Considering how ubiquitous 2D selfies have become—on average, 93 million of them are taken worldwide every day—it was only a matter of time until the game got raised.

Now you can print a person, or at least a 3D pocket-size model of said person.

One place offering such option is Objex Unlimited, a 3D printing company in Toronto, which launched Selftraits in 2015 as a consumer-facing brand to capture and create 3D selfies.

“We like to say we capture both motion and emotion in our 3D scans,” says Joe Kiez, the company’s director of marketing and design.

The process of replicating a person in five-inch form starts with capturing his or her image from all angles. For this, Selftraits turns to Canon cameras and lenses by creating an immersive, in-studio experience that involves a white booth surrounded with 140 meticulously positioned Canon DSLR cameras. The mobile booth used at events—including at the Air Canada Centre for Toronto Raptors games and the launch of the Itty Bitty Ballers campaign, the CNE, industry conferences, brand activations and corporate events—is a scaled-down setup with 128 cameras.

The studio booth setup includes a mix of Canon EOS Rebel T3i and Canon EOS Rebel SL1 DSLR cameras; the mobile unit, only SL1s. Both booths are outfitted with an array of 18-55mm and 50mm lenses, with the mobile unit also using 10-18mm lenses, and the studio booth including 24mm, 85mm and 100mm lenses.

“Canon [cameras] allow us to plug and play a lot easier,” says Kiez. “The ports are standardized to what exists in the industry. We can harness the back end of the cameras and work with the SDKs [software development kits] that are provided to control the cameras to the levels we need—control shutter, provide power to the cameras and control everything through the USB ports.”

To get your itty bitty 3D selfie, you just step into the booth and strike your pose. A photographer works to finalize your pose and shoots away as he or she would for a traditional 2D portrait. Except in this case, it’s not the sound of one shutter that greets the subject, but rather that of 128, or 140, shutters going off simultaneously.

As many as 60 photos could be taken during a 30-minute studio session. That’s 8,400 images.

“It’s a lot of data to process,” says Kiez. “But we’ve optimized our system so when customers walk out of the booth, they’re experiencing their photos on [a preview] screen instantaneously.”

Multiple photos from different angles, and different planes, get stitched together to create the 3D geometry.

Realistically, most people could walk into the booth, take one photo, walk back out and their mini 3D selfies are just about done. Others may want to combine scans—the facial expression from one, the body from another.

“We can work with those files through Photoshop to process and stitch the data together so someone can use both poses,” says Kiez.

The final results are not photo-realistic, but they are certainly lifelike, capturing details as fine as facial expressions, shirt movements and muscle tone.

Selftraits builds the selfies pixel by pixel, stitching together data, writing algorithms and referencing both the colour and depth of an image. It’s then a balance between optimal data and ideal price point. “Having an 18-megapixel camera allows us more data to capture with, and when you’re building pixel by pixel, the pixel count becomes very important,” says Kiez. “We’re creating a 2.3 giga-pixel resolution.”

Once the data is processed, it’s sent to a digital sculptor, who cleans up any occlusions or imperfections in the scanned data before sending it to the 3D printer.

There, the figurines are built layer upon layer in a bed of gypsum powder that applies ink and a binding agent simultaneously. It’s then cured, and the finishing takes place by hand, in which the 3D selfie is pulled off the printer, de-powdered and dipped in cyanoacrylate (essentially, superglue) for structural integrity. The model gets dipped a few times in wax, cured, then packaged and sent to the consumer.

It takes one week to go from photoshoot to 3D selfie at your doorstep. Prices start at $120 for a five-inch model, and go up depending on the size and scale of the model.