'We print people': The world of 3D portraiture

However, at a small stall that popped up on Industry Day at the American Physical Society's March meeting - that is precisely the service that was being offered. I stepped on to a little rotating platform, tried to stand still for a few awkward minutes while a camera scanned me up and down, and then filled out a form. A few weeks later, a box has arrived in the post. Somewhere inside it, my two-inch twin is waiting for me to overcome my trepidation and show him the light of day. But I'm in no hurry; it all seems a bit... odd. The box sits on my desk for several days. Even though getting "printed" puts me in the illustrious company of Barack Obama and Richard III, I'm unsure about my decision. What, I wonder, does someone do with a small selfie in statue form? Where does this business find its customers? Brides and policemen It's not strictly a selfie, of course, because I didn't "take" it (or make it) myself. I was scanned on a turntable in San Antonio, Texas, and then a colourful 3D rendering of me was uploaded to the company's headquarters in Emeryville, California, for manufacturing on their industrial-grade, colour 3D printers. The company behind this set-up is Twindom. And its co-founder Richard Berwick tells me that over time, he found that the key to the market was not, in fact, 3D selfies. "To be honest, that market is extraordinarily small. Because it's just a tchotchke; it really doesn't mean much to people." Instead, Mr Berwick says the business now targets families, parents and pet owners - people who want a keepsake of someone dear to them. "It's not usually the people in the frame that have the print. It's always their friends and family, eventually," he says. Family groups and pets struggle to sit still on a turntable, though. So the company's newer system is a big booth, studded with cameras, which takes an instant 3D snapshot. "Now we have something that can capture a pet or a small child, moving around," Mr Berwick says. This "Twinstant" contraption retails for $60,000 and has been purchased by several companies across the US, as well as in Australia and Japan. Mr Berwick says one is now being installed by London company Empower3D. The UK supermarket chain Asda is already doing something similar with its 3DMe service. At the other end of the scale, Twindom has developed a tablet-based, mobile scanning system. The turntable version I encountered at the conference in Texas is the original, and it still does a lot of business. "I go to a lot of different shows. We're going to South by Southwest next week," Russ Ramirez told me as I waited for my scan at his stall. "Cosplay conferences are really big, too, in terms of customers." That much was clear from the samples on display: punters dressed as Wonder Woman and Mr Spock stand out from the diminutive crowd. So a lot of people do come to the portable kiosk for a selfie, it seems. "I think it's both," Mr Ramirez said. "Some of them like it for themselves, and some of them - like the policemen - they give it to their kids" Policemen? "We do a lot of policemen. Probably the number one customer, besides cosplayers, is policemen. Next week, I'm going to a county sheriff's office." The Texas outpost of Twindom where Mr Ramirez works seems to have stumbled on a very particular market. Read more on BBC News