Well, it had to happen. First there was Star Trek, with their replicators, far-fetched contraptions that take molecules floatin' all around and combine them into delicious foods (such as heavy water, trans fat brulée, and the ever-popular "cancer flambata"). Now we have real-life 3D printers.
That's right, a printer that can print WHATEVER you want WHENEVER you want it. As long as whatever you want can be composed of starchy dust particles and micro-adhesive. And as long as you have a few hours to kill. And, oh yeah, a 3D printer.
My college had one or two of these, actually. My architect friends used it to make scale models of buildings that they could use to accurately depict how they would collapse in horrible, tragic accidents that the New York Times would refer to as "a travesty of lost humanity" for years to come long before the collapses ever occurred. Sometimes, if they were feeling particularly saucy, they would model comically exaggerated, replicas of male genitalia for students to discover later.
A New York Times article includes this tidbit:
“You could go to Mattel.com, download Barbie, scan your Mom’s head, slap the head on Barbie and print it out,” suggests Joe Shenberger, the director of sales for Desktop Factory. “You could have a true custom one-off toy.”
Call me a creepy, self-loathing sociopath with unresolved semi-incestuous personal issues, but does this remind anyone of when the video game "Perfect Dark" came out for the N64? It advertised a feature where gamers could use their Gameboy Camera to take photos of people that could be applied to in-game characters.
Not long after, the developer, Rare Entertainment, announced that they were scrapping the system for technical reasons. Further investigation revealed that it may have had more to do with fears that our psychotic youth were going to turn the game into a practice Columbine, or a "Menendez Brothers" simulator.
I can't wait to see how much we can societally fuck up little girls who want to apply their own visage to Barbie's perfect body. On the plus side, maybe they can somehow incorporate this technology with the classic Easy-Bake Oven… Batteries not included, I bet.