Here's the world's first robot tattoo artist

With tinkering from a group of French students, a 3D printer was converted into a tattoo machine of sorts, a tech site reported over the weekend.

 

The feat by design students Pierre Emm, Piotr Widelka and Johan Da Silveira was in response to a challenge by France's Cultural Ministry.

 

"After a short brainstorm, all the teams came up with similar ideas, except one, who really went out of the box with their concept. They had this silly idea of making a machine that could automatically create tattoos taken from a bank of images. They learned from le FabShop's representative that their concept was more than feasible. It could be prototyped by themselves, using the school's equipment," they said in their Instructables page.

 

In October 2013, the ENSCI les Ateliers, a design school in Paris, hosted a workshop organized by the French Ministry of culture.

 

Dubbed Public Domain Remix, the workshop aimed to use images, videos and sound in the national public domain and use them in a sort of “Mashup.”

 

For their project, the students hacked a 3D printer and let it trace on skin using a pen instead of the extruder, amazing the crowd.

 

In a Vimeo video, the students showed the machine tattooing a perfect circle:

 

 

 

UK site T3.com said the students, after the competition, borrowed a manual tattoo-machine from an amateur tattooist and practiced on artificial silicone skin.

 

"The big difficulty was to repeat the same exercise on a curved surface and on a material that has much more flexibility than silicone. Many tricks were tried to tighten the area around the skin (a metal ring, elastics, scotch tape...) but the most effective one was a scooter's inner tube, open on the area to be marked," they said.

 

"The group of tech tattooists eventually found a willing volunteer, the first person ever to have a robot tattoo," T3.com said. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News