Artist uses Kinect to bring pixelated sculpture into real world

Artist Luke Jerram has created a pixelated sculpture of his daughter Maya using an Xbox Kinect, aluminum sheets and more than 5,000 colored stickers for an art project that now stands on Platform 1 at Bristol Temple Meads train station in the U.K.

Jerram describes the work as a three-dimensional pixelated portrait where, from a distance, the sculpture looks like a little girl standing alone. Upon getting closer, the object appears to fragment into cubes.

“This project has stemmed from Jerram’s ongoing research of visual perception and optical illusions,” reads the artist’s statement on Jerram’s website. “The fact that he is colorblind has given him a natural interest in exploring ‘the edges of perception.’”

The process for creating the sculpture involved having his daughter Maya scanned using an Xbox Kinect. Her head was scanned at the Machine Vision Laboratory at the University of West of England. The Kinect body scan was then pixelated into cubes, and the model was created from waterjet cut sheets of aluminum. More than 5,000 colored stickers were then printed and carefully stuck onto the aluminum surface.

The project is part of the Bristol Temple Quarter Commissions.