(NewsNation) — Graduating senior students at the Georgia Academy for the Blind recently received yearbooks that will help them remember classmates on their terms: a framed collection of 3-D printed faces they can touch.
“They were definitely grateful and very excited to be able to touch their own face and touch their classmates’ faces,” said Hannah Higgins, a biomedical engineering student and teaching assistant at Mercer University, who helped with the project and saw students’ reactions first-hand.
“I heard a lot of talk of like, ‘Oh my gosh they got your hair right! Feel your hair, that’s so cool!’ things like that. So it was a very awesome experience,” she said.
Prior to using the 3D-printed yearbooks, the Georgia Academy for the Blind used traditional yearbooks, as most students at the school are visually impaired but not completely blind. But the shift to 3D-printed yearbooks enabled all students to be able to make out rich details which would otherwise have been difficult to ascertain. Unlike traditional yearbooks, these yearbooks are built around thick and sturdy wooden frames that contain the printed faces.
“When our students receive these yearbooks, they are completely mesmerized. And I don’t think that they truly understand what it’s gong to be until they actually see it themselves,” said Cindy Gibson, the Georgia Academy for the Blind’s Superintendent.
For the last six years, engineering students at Mercer University have worked with the academy, located in Macon, Georgia, on the 3D printing collaboration.
The process starts by doing 3D scans of students’ faces which takes about four minutes, Higgins said.
Once the scans are complete, the team at Mercer can go and make edits in their software if there are any imperfections.
“We take reference photos… to make sure their features are accurate to them and we keep as much hair as we can because that’s a personal feature,” Higgins said.
Mercer prints about a dozen yearbooks every year so that each graduate can have one. The process is time-consuming — altogether, it takes the Mercer team several months to do the scans, edit the images, and do the printing.
Higgins said it’s important to know your audience when you make these yearbooks. She explained that they put a lot of thought into the size and scale of the heads and listened to the students about they wanted.
Gibson added that building the yearbooks can be an expensive process, but this year the Knight Foundation offered funding that supported the project.
