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Apr 102012
 
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Toy Company Offering ‘Personalized Action Figures’ for $127

"Accurate? It'll be like looking in a teaspoon."

If you’re willing to shell out about $127 (or £79.99) you can have  an action figure one of five DC Comic’s classic superheroes with your head on it. Firebox, a U.K. novelty company, is offering the figurines – you just upload a well-lit front and profile head shot of yourself to its website.  Firebox will then use your photos to create a 3D-printed head in your likeness for you to place on Batman, Batgirl, Superman, The Joker or Wonder Woman.

“Using advanced 3-D printing technology your photographs will be turned into a fully-formed 3-D version of your noggin – including eye color, skin tone, hair style (or as close as possible) and hair color,” states the company website . “Accurate? It’ll be like looking in a teaspoon.”

The company will send you the action figure and the replica of your head, which together stand about 6 ½ inches tall. The kit enables you to remove the original head and attach your own, either temporarily or permanently.

“The assembly instructions aren’t super high tech (soak the figure in water, yank off head, pack the new one on with putty), which leaves us a little skeptical that the custom head will be the most accurately detailed piece of work in the world,” according to Gizmodo . “It costs a good chunk of change, too, at about $127, but oh goodness do we want to believe in this particular bit of magic.”

Considering that the head is packed on with putty, it’s probably not something you’ll be wanting to give a child to play with, and the product is obviously the head, combined with action figures resold off the shelf – but if you have the cash for something like this, it’s still quite the novelty.

This isn’t the only service offering 3D printed likenesses on figurines, howwever.  We also found SculpteoThatsMyFace.com (which also does superhero action figures) and a host of others, most of which are cheaper than Firebox, averaging about $80 to Firebox’s $127.  Then there’s FigurePrints, who can print out your build from Minecraft, or your avatar from World of Warcraft or XBox Live.

The machines that do it are expensive enough that they’re purchased by businesses who then sublet time on the machines and/or sell one-off items to consumers.

If it’s out there, there is a toy of it.  Even you.

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