Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
If you can dream it, you can draw it—at least, if you dream in bright blue plastic. Insert the Andy Warhol joke of your choice here.
The breathtakingly awesome and almost-entirely-superfluous-to-your-existence 3Doodler is one of the more successful Kickstarter projects in history. Launched on Feb. 19, it’s already achieved $1,459,969 in pledges of the $30,000 requested (yes, you read that right). The founders are, presumably, off somewhere drawing themselves new Lamborghinis at this very moment.
The creators say, “There are many ways 3Doodler can be used. 3Doodles can be created as flat forms and peeled off a piece of paper, as freestyle 3D objects, or in separate parts, ready to be joined together using the 3Doodler.” To facilitate your creativity, they’ve included some stencils to create your own Eiffel Tower (not 1:1), among other items.
The principle is simple enough: Using ABS plastic, a special kind of plastic common to more traditional 3D printers (“more traditional 3D printers?” Welcome to the 21st century), the pen acts almost like a glue gun, heating and extruding the matrix, which solidifies almost instantly, allowing the plastic to leave the page and make the leap into 3-D space.
To call it “a hit” is to understate the social media situation to a truly felonious extent, rather like calling the Pacific Ocean “moist.” The Kickstarter has 89,633 Facebook likes, and the blog post at This Is Colossal has been tweeted 1,947 times. It’s also collected 168,184 Tumblr notes just in case you thought there was a corner of social media that had overlooked it.
