Todd Blatt
Google Glass
Google Glass has been causing a stir ever since its announcement; Google’s hand’s free smartphone (of sorts) has been in the news for all manner of reasons from the interesting - Wimbledon Pro Chronicles Journey Through Google Glass – to the censoring - Casinos ban gamblers from wearing Google Glass – to the downright scaremongering - Google Glass privacy concerns raised by international data protection authorities.
Glass and 3D printing seem intrinsically linked, not only do they share similar media trends but users are now converging the tech to create 3D scans and prints respectively.
One such user is Todd Blatt, a keen maker and BETA tester of Glass. Blatt has detailed on his blog how he wandered around Walters Art Museum in Baltimore looking for a decent piece to scan, when he found a subject he moved around the object saying “Ok glass, take a picture” over 30 times (he must have looked a little manic).
The pictures, which are automatically saved to the cloud were then placed in Autodesk’s 123D catch and cleaned up with Meshmixer. Hey Presto! A 3D printable file of a precious artefact in no time at all, with relatively little effort.
While this will be of little worry to museums throughout the world at the moment, as the technology progresses, apps are developed and a glass-to-print eco-system exists, this will surely lead to constraints being placed on the use of Glass by museums, who are only just adopting the technology themselves?
