People will do a lot of weird things to advertise their business. I always remember the guy standing on the corner of the street outside the car dealer in a bunny suit. To be honest I think its a big waste of time to make a guy stand out there and dance like a fool with a sign board over his head. If I am going to buy a car it won’t be because of some guy in a rabbit suit. One of my favorite advertising schemes is the Costco free samples. You know what I’m talking about. You walk into the store and about every other isle there is someone standing at a table setup with some type of food. The idea I guess is to get you to try so that you will buy. I love going around and trying all of them. As I munch on whatever they give me I feel obligated to act half interested in actually buying the product. The fact is that I never do. I suppose the strangest advertising scheme I heard about had to do 3D scanning services by a 3D printing company from Spain. They 3D scanned and 3D printed people as a way to advertise their company.
The groups name is Grupo Sicnova and they went to some interesting extremes to promote their product. The product that they sell is a 3D scanner called Clonescan3D. The Clonescan3D can do a 3D scan of an object in a very short amount of time. The company decided to promote this 3D scanner by doing a 3D scan of every person in a village. After that they printed our a small figurine of every person. The total population was 318 people. Does that sound like a crazy idea or what? The whole idea behind this is to show people what the seven foot tall scanner can do. Their goal is to get everyone in Spain scanned. Actually that sounds kind of scary.
So how fast is this thing? Well, how long does it take to whistle Dixie? About the same time. In just 15 seconds the scanner can do a complete scan of a person. After that, only 90 seconds is needed to take that data and make a digital model. The 3D scanner itself is not quite like other body scanning devices. The scanner has four sensors that can capture each angle of the person. The sensors move up and down vertically so that it can record data from top to bottom. The 3D scanner includes different kinds of sensors to record different information. The sensors can detect shape and also texture.
So I guess if everything works out then everyone is going to get a personalized figurine. That’s pretty cool, but to be honest I would rather get some free food samples and watch some guy jump around in a bunny suit with a sign in his hands.