Four years ago, a man by the name of Janos Stone got an idea in his head. He'd been tinkering around with the then-budding field of 3D printing, and wanted to find a way to make the experience more personal. He's been hard at work over at Northeastern University ever since, and we recently sat down with Mr. Stone to check on his progress.
What Janos Stone introduced us to was ANA, or the Alphanumeric Avatar. In the words of its creator, ANA is the process of "manifesting data into self-portraits." And in the case of the shapes created thus far, that means your email address. A simple, physical expression of data, unique to you. It looks like this:
Each color and shape in an ANA object represents one of 36 possible characters. Each of the letter of the alphabet, as well as numbers zero through nine, have a unique color and shape combination. That means that printing ANA objects in anything but full color would be tantamount to losing your data. Thankfully there are full-color 3D printers out there capable of handling the job.
ANA was not Stone's first attempt at creating a personal 3D printing experience. Stone's first foray into 3D printing software was an app called MeCube. The app made the process of creating a 3D-printable object as simple as playing with building blocks. Something that has led its users to what Stone describes as a watershed moment — the printing of something you designed yourself.
A 3D printed email address certainly won't be the end of this project. The future of Stone's work with ANA is something even more remarkable. He plans to miniaturize the same techniques that have created these colorful, cryptic email addresses down to the nano scale. Once miniaturized, the amount of data that can be stored as an object will balloon. Terabytes of data could be printedinto the surface of a cup or a toy.
Read by lasers, this data will become a sort of modern-day cryptex, only obtainable by those who know how to get at it. And that isn't even the end of Stone's plan for ANA. He envisions a future for the software where individual ANAs would be able to interpret data they receive — pictures, movies and spreadsheets alike — and create their own expressions of that data. Once purchased, these ANAs would then develop on their own, learning from their past creations and refining their expressions in unique ways.
This is Stone's ultimate dream: the creation of the first "computer that sculpts." If you'd like to try your hand at using ANA right now, head on over to the Stone's website here. You can even hit 'print' — just don't expect to receive your own ANA object just yet. instead you'll be sending your creation's data to Stone himself. Where he'll use it to inform the beta version of the software he's working on.
ANA is currently awaiting the beginning of a student-only trial run at Northeastern University. If all goes well, the public will see their own version sometime in the near future. As for the computer that sculpts, we'll all have to keep our eye on the horizon for the day that arrives.
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