Watch out, Barbie: omnivorous beasts are assembling in a 3D printer near you. A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters—or any other three-dimensional animations—into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3D printer. The project is described in detail in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics and will be presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference on August 7. Besides its obvious consumer appeal, the tool constitutes a remarkable piece of code and an usual conceptual exploration of the virtual and physical worlds. [read about it]