We all saw the episode of The Big Bang Theory were Howard Wolowitz and Raj Koothrappali turned to 3D scanning and printing after being disappointed with customised figurines of themselves ordered from the internet, right?
For those who don’t know, The Big Bang Theory is the most popular television comedy across the globe right now, breaking records for channels E4 and CBS year on year. The show revolves around four geeky guys and one not so geeky girl getting into various scientific capers. New technologies are often exposed to as many as 22 million people on the show; 3D printing and scanning had its big outing in Season 6 Episode 14, Cooper/Kripke Inversion.
In the episode Raj suggests buying a 3D printer to make realistic looking figurines. Being like any good hacker in the world they adapted a Microsoft Kinect to scan themselves ready for the print on their “$5,000 used printer”.
Ladies and Gentlemen prepare for some fourth wall breaking revelations here. The scans for the dolls were not actually made on a Kinect! The resolution and texture produced by a Kinect could not produce the correct 3D print for the models. So they turned to some scanning experts form Rapid Scan to use their Artec Evas to scan the two members of the cast.
Artec have exclusively revealed some behind the scenes photos of Howard (Simon Helberg) and Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) being scanned by Rapid Scan’s Chris Strong.
So there you have it, not everything you see on television about 3D printing is entirely accurate and often a little bit over the top. Next they’ll be telling us that the Crystal Meth used in Breaking Bad wasn’t actually Methamphetamine…
