Three industrial design students attending ENSCI les Ateliers in Paris, France, have converted a MakerBot 3D printer into becoming an automatic tattooing machine.
In 2013, ENSCI les Ateliers hosted a workshop called the Public Domain Remix. Organized by the French Ministry of culture in collaboration with Le FabShop, a digital manufacturing expert, the objective for the students participating in the workshop was to use digital material in the national public domain to repurpose, hack or alter it.
Pierre Emm, Johan Da Silveira and Piotr Widelka, came up with the wild idea of creating a machine that could automatically create tattoos of images in the national public domain. With the guidance of Le FabShop, the team replaced a Makerbot 3D printers extruder with a pen and enabled it to trace on skin. In less than 8 hours, the first prototype of Tatoué was born.
Continuing development by replacing the extruder with a tattooing needle, the team then adapted the Autodesk software to convert tattoo designs into digital files so that it could be downloaded to Tatouè. With all the required components in place, testing on silicone-based artificial skin began.
The team realized during testing that the biggest issue when it came to tattooing on real humans was the curved and unique surface area of each individual. To counter this, the subject had to be completely still, levelled, and had to have their skin flattened using a scooters inner tube.
With further improvements made to Tatoué, their latest iteration uses a custom-designed needle with a sensor to read the surface of the subjects skin to detect changes in texture, bodies contours, and curved surfaces.
To learn more about Tatoué, click the link below.
