Print And Eat Your Chocolate Face

David Carr along with his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab built a machine to personalize his chocolate. He was tired of the traditional goodies associated with Easter. He built the ”Eat Your Face Machine”, a CNC machine for ”subtractive printing” that works with chocolate. Computer scans your face and uses the data to carve out a model from a block of chocolate.

David Carr, Research Associate at the MIT Media Lab explains: ”The computer takes a model of your face and actually instructs that machine to carve away a block of chocolate and leave the part of the chocolate that is your face and when all is said and done that is what you have left. Chocolate and food are really interesting because the enable us to bring in other senses other than just looking and touching and, you know, we have thing like tasting and there are really neat properties like you can eat it when you are done and that is always really exciting.”

David Carr thinks that is really the magic of fabrication on your desktop or making things on your desktop is this idea that everything could be unique and personalised to you rather than just being stamped out from some mould in a big factory. The ”Eat Your Face Machine” experiment reaffirmed his belief that personal fabrication is increasingly going to make its way into our lives and most likely wont make it to many shopping malls.