Father-Son Team Looking for a Boom in Busts : New Laser Process Sculpts Artworks--or Likenesses Useful in Plastic Surgery

It’s instant sculpture.

You walk into a photography studio, sit in a standard office chair. Hold extremely still for 15 seconds. No blinking for five.

A computerized camera shaped like the light over a dentist’s chair swivels around you, shining a laser beam at your face and measuring distances to your head and shoulders from two fixed points. A quarter of a million different measurements are recorded in those 15 seconds.

That much of your time--plus at least $200 of your money--is all that’s needed from you to create a piece of physical immortality. Or a reasonable facsimile.

The accumulated data (which now spans everything from the degree of fullness in your lips to the exact depth of the lines around your eyes) is fed into a computer and relayed, over telephone wires or by mail, to a computer-controlled mill in Pacific Grove, Calif.

A Bronze for $2,700

There, in about three hours, the mill carves a rather precise bust of your likeness. Two to 10 more hours are required for artisans to finish off the rough edges (or smooth out wrinkles, if you like) and apply a bronze or other coating of your choosing. (Fancier, cast bronze busts are also available to those willing to invest considerably more money--$2,700 for a full-size bust--and wait longer for the end result. Prices start at $200 for a finished quarter-size bust, which is about 4 inches tall.)

But compared to the typical time and expense required for artists to create lifelike busts (several thousand dollars and several months), this is zap sculpture, speed-of-light fast and decidedly lower priced.

Its creators call it Rapid 3-D Digitizing and they’re being careful not to confuse it with fine art or Michelangelo with a laser. But they expect that their digital sculpture will do for three-dimensional objects what the Xerox machine did for two-dimensional material--multiply it like crazy.

And Lloyd and David Addleman, the father-and-son team from the Monterey area who invented the process, similarly like to think their machines may do for traditional sculpture what photography did to portrait painting--in short, make personal images easily and inexpensively available.

Aid in Surgery

Physicians who have experimented with the busts are also excited about using digital sculpture as an aid in cosmetic and reconstructive surgical procedures. Additional applications are being explored in such fields as manufacturing, criminology, archeology, engineering, anthropology, computer graphics and more.

For example, helmets for Lazer Tag, predicted to be one of the hot toys for the Christmas season, were designed using the digitizer. And representatives from the Army and Air Force have investigated the technology as a possible tool in fitting military uniforms, gas masks and other protective gear.

For now, though, the busts have been commercially available to the public for about a month in just two California test markets: Woodland Hills (through the Howard Kaish and Associates photo studio, where partner/photographer Curtis Dahl has sold 10 of the busts) and in Carmel (through Proud Portraits, where Tony Stender is still setting up the process and has only sold three).

And about 300 people, including Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and other members of the cast of the upcoming “Star Trek IV” film have stopped in to sit for 15-second digitizing sessions at Cyberware Laboratory Inc., the Addlemans’ Pacific Grove research and development firm. (It no longer sells to the public.) Now, Mr. Spock and Capt. Kirk have been dematerialized in previous “Star Trek” incarnations, but why were they recently digitized?

Computer animators from Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ special effects company that is creating the celluloid wizardry for “Star Trek IV,” refused to tell even the Addlemans what use the actors’ busts would serve. The Addlemans, however, put the stars’ measurements to unexpected use; they created busts of Nimoy and Shatner in which the facial features were stretched--much like they would be in a fun house mirror. The inventors simply wanted to demonstrate one of their technology’s more unusual possibilities on a couple of famous faces.

Other early users of the fast sculpture machinery have included such physicians as Dr. William Seare Jr., a Salt Lake City plastic surgeon in private practice. Seare has had his 3-D Digitizer for about six weeks and already calls it “invaluable.”

Before and After

Thus far, he has used busts (cut from the light-but-tough polyurethane foam used in surfboards) to show three patients what they looked like before and possibly after surgery. During a “3-D consultation,” priced at $500, Seare whittles away at a foam bust of the patient to show potential reductions. Or he adds material to the bust to demonstrate potential augmentations.

In one of the three cases in which he used before-and-after busts, the process made a huge difference.

“On this one lady, I would have made a radical change,” Seare recalled, adding that after she saw how she would look, she chose a far less drastic nose job than originally planned.

“We were able to give her what she wanted. I think this is such a valuable tool because if I’m aiming at my idea of beauty and the patient has a different idea, we can come much closer to what the patient wants,” Seare said.

He cautioned, however, that the 3-D Digitizer “is not meant to be a warranty, just a useful tool.”

He also suspects the device will help avoid malpractice judgments (“If there’s ever a question of medical malpractice--’My nose never looked that bad’--I can document what it looked like in 3-D”). And, when it’s possible to digitize other portions of the body or even the entire body (the machinery necessary for this has yet to be built, but it’s expected in a year or so), Seare thinks it will assist fat suctioning patients to make more accurate estimates of how much fat they really want removed.

Other plastic surgeons have pointed out that the 3-D Digitizer may prove useful in reconstructive surgery cases, in which part of a face is missing or damaged. Information from one side of the face can be used to create a likeness of what ideally reconstructed features should look like or to create correctly sized implants.

“The machine may be of significant scientific and clinical benefit,” predicted Dr. Court Cutting, an assistant professor of plastic surgery at New York University Medical Center. “I think it’s quite a device, really earthshaking.”

‘Lots of Possibilities’

Cutting, who recently persuaded the medical center’s Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery to purchase digitizers, suspects the contraption may also hold “lots of possibilities for (other branches of) medicine.”

“Until now, any sort of facial reconstructive or cosmetic surgery has been been pretty much an art,” Cutting continued. “What we hope to do is make it a science and one of the things that’s necessary is a comprehensive way to measure facial shape.

“With the Addlemans’ machine, it’s possible to measure every surface contour on the face in a matter of seconds with no radiation.”

How did all this come about?

According to Lloyd Addleman, 59, he merely wanted to get out of retirement and create a family business, something that could utilize the talents of his wife, Pat, an artist who’s sculpted in clay, his son David, a computer software engineer/consultant, and his son Stephen, a chemist.

Lloyd Addleman, who was included in a 1960 Fortune magazine article titled “The Egghead Millionaires” (which noted he had no servants and intentionally kept his children in public schools), has worked primarily in radar equipment design, mostly for the military. Among other things, he contributed to Loran, a navigational system used by ships, and he’s invented equipment for the intelligence community to capture microwave transmissions.

“Lloyd came up with the (digital sculpture) idea. We both developed the product, pretty much 50/50 once he had the idea,” said Lloyd’s son, 31-year-old David Addleman. “We tried a lot of things, argued a lot, but it’s been a real pleasure working on this.”

“We spent about three years before we had anything that was any good,” Lloyd Addleman remembered. “We tried a photographic approach where we would illuminate the face with a whole grid of different colored lines and then analyze that by computer. That got to be too complicated. We tried another system where the measurements were a combination of sound and light. That might still work but it didn’t for us.

“So we went back to doing what a surveyor does: triangulating, looking at something from two different points of view, working out the trigonometric problems.”

While the Addlemans’ system can achieve more detailing than currently offered to the public (250,000 points are usually measured by the camera, but it’s capable of calculating 500,000), they decided to stick with the lower number.

“Several things come into play,” Lloyd Addleman explained. “The more accurate it (the bust) is, the more expensive it is to produce. And there’s an artistic decision in there somewhere. Does the person really want more detail? Does a person really want to see more warts and wrinkles? . . . You could get more detail, but not a great deal more than we have now, and you’d have to look for it. The subjective effect would be less than you might expect.”

Subjective responses from sculptors asked to comment on the value or possible uses of digitized busts range from intrigued to indifferent.

“It isn’t what I would call sculpture in the full sense. A sculptor tries to interpret something whereas this just copies it. But it has a lot of potential uses for a sculptor. He can use it to scale up or scale down pieces of his own sculpture,” said Jesse Corsaut, a Pacific Grove portrait painter and occasional sculptor.

Corsaut also noted that the process is well-suited to the creation of life masks, a type of sculpture in which the face (or body) serves as the cast. “The trouble with (traditionally made) life masks is that their weight causes the flesh to sag. If you use this process, you could get a perfect replica of the form without the sagging.”

Corsaut expects the new process will cut into the business of portrait sculptors somewhat, much like portrait photography once diverted a portion of the painted portrait trade. But he’s not worried.

As he put it, “Photography still can’t rival a really fine oil painting and I feel the same way about this compared to the work of a creative portrait sculptor.”

Two internationally known contemporary sculptors, both of whom use human figures in their work, voiced similar opinions.

“The thing that makes people individuals is that we make mistakes in perception, we’re not accurate in what we see,” said Venice-based Robert Graham. “This (technology) is no more of interest than photography is to really looking at a person . . . The limits are almost prescribed in the technique. You can’t get past that fixed focus. You only get what you can manipulate the system to do.”

Said George Segal, from his home in North Brunswick, N.J.: “For me the most interesting thing in sculpture is the quality of the artist’s mind. The machine duplicating a piece of observed reality excludes any trace of feeling. It might be interesting as a curiosity, but I think it’s doubtful that it can have longer interest than that.”

Segal recalled seeing sculpture made from a similar process several years ago in New York, pieces he deemed “not very interesting.”

(According to Lloyd Addleman, two different firms have unsuccessfully attempted to market photographically created sculptures, but he said that from what he’s heard about the technologies they used, they were unlike his Rapid 3-D Digitizing process.)

Where’s it all headed?

Lloyd Addleman’s neighbor, 52-year-old John Soper, a former Letraset executive induced to end eight years of retirement to take on the marketing of digital sculpture, said the firm is currently concentrating on installing cameras in leading photographers’ studios across the country.

For now, there’s no franchise operation involved, simply the sale of a $40,000 camera, the promise that busts will be cut and finished in Pacific Grove (at present two busts can be cut and finished per day) and the offering of research on what customers want.

(Preliminary research shows a very high percentage of people would like to have a sculpture of themselves--if given it as a gift, Soper said, and that purchasers are most likely to buy a bust of a subject other than themselves.)

Soper is also negotiating rights to the system in Japan and England. And he’s scurrying to establish Cyberware (or Echo Portrait Sculpture as its retail division is known) as the leader in a field likely to inspire imitators.

“Any good idea gets copied,” he observed. “Our intention is to be the best marketers in this. We know that anyone trying to copy us will have a lot of difficulties that they won’t even know exist today. So we think we have a lead.

“We’ve applied for worldwide patents, which we will enforce, but it takes two to three years for a patent to be issued . . . If this is as successful as I expect, there will be others who will enter the field. We intend to be the Kodak.”

With, of course, a touch of Polaroid for instant results.