Levitt Goodman Architects has found a way to put the average office gift to shame. While some companies opted for gourmet food baskets or Starbucks gift cards as a show of holiday cheer last year, the Canadian architecture firm called on Matt Compeau and Bi-Ying Mao of Hot Pop Factory to come up with something special.
The creative duo ended up making personalized Pez dispensers modeled after each Levitt Goodman employee, relying on “an XBOX Kinect, ReconstructMe, and some open-source hackery” to scan and digitize each person. In order to keep the gifts a surprise, they had to pretend it was all for a research project. Once they had the likenesses of each employee, the rest was just printing plastic heads and affixing them to a pez dispenser.
In addition to breaking down Hot Pop Factory’s process, The Salt looks into other new technologies for 3-D food. There is the Fab@Home Project, for example, which is in the midst of “developing consumer-scale food printers.” All these advancements point toward a future where we might be “printing out food with personalized recipes.”
[via The Salt]