Numediart-Arts² Collaborative Project "3Daguerreotype" Wins Grand Prize at the KIKK Festival

The Grand Prize of the KIKK Festival has been awarded to a winning collaborative team of engineers from the NUMEDIART Institute (University of Mons) and digital artists from the Academy of Arts (Arts2):

• François Rocca and Julien Leroy, PhD students and researchers in the domain of civil engineering at the UMONS Faculty of Engineering and at the NUMEDIART Institute.
• Jefta Hoekendijk, 26 and of Dutch origin, now living in Mons. Through his digital works, he reminds us that photography is a gateway to all possibilities and, far from being just an objective, it is a medium in the art industry.  

"3Daguerreotype" is an original photographic process that produces 3D masks of faces, like a 3D photobooth. Once the participant's head is scanned, the mask is printed in colour in the form of a simplified puzzle, followed by some cutting, folding and gluing to make the mask itself, a process otherwise known as "papercraft". This can also be done with a 3D printer.

This digital installation is based on recent research on 3D technologies.  With a 3D sensor, such as Microsoft's Kinect, the sensors can scan a person's face. This scan is then processed to correct and simplify the previously captured 3D geometry. The face then gets coloured in, is transformed into 3D, and can be printed in the form of a papercraft.

The development of this project will be implemented and supported by Foundation Mons 2015. It also plans to include a 3D printer that will be able to print faces after scanning them.