What a doll
By Dave Demerjian
Fast Company, June 2007

Think of it as art imitating art imitating life, more or less. For $100 to $200 apiece, a startup called Fabjectory will turn your virtual-world avatar into a plastic statuette. “People are passionate about Second Life,” says Mike Buckbee, who came up with the gambit last year. “And they love the idea of bringing a piece of it into their real lives.” Buckbee meets clients online at a “capture space” he has built in Second Life, the phenomenally popular online fantasy “world.” He uses an open-source extractor to download their animated avatars, and an artist re-creates textures, colors, and details lost in the transition from two dimensions to three. Final files are sent to a rapid-prototyping machine that builds the 5- to 7-inch models at the rate of an inch an hour by laying down layers of colored glue and plaster. That’s kinda slow, one reason Huckbee has made just 30 replicas so far.