Team io9 Turned Ourselves Into Action Figures, and the Results Are… Hmm

The arrival of Hasbro’s “Selfie Series” figures at last weekend’s Pulse Con finally offers people (in the U.S., at least) the chance to get their own little lifelike action figure, lifelike so long as you dream of being one of several fine Hasbro-affiliated licenses already. But how does the tech hold up? Well, the app at least makes things interesting.

While what we’ve seen of Hasbro’s proposed end-results for the Selfie Series look pretty neat, the problem right now is that the creative process that leads to you eventually spending $60 on such a project leaves something a little to be desired. It involves a series of pictures you’re asked to take of yourself, which the Hasbro app then uses to create a map of your face that will eventually be printed onto a figure sculpt.

It’s an easy enough task, but the way the images are previewed in the app—awkwardly rendered in 3D with whatever hair and body you pick, from Star Wars characters to Power Rangers, from Spider-Man to Ghostbusters—leaves… something to be desired. As action-figure fans struggled to capture something that didn’t look like it came out of the new Hellraiser, the staffers at io9 (at least, those of us in the U.S., harumph) took a glimpse inside the virtual mirror to see how they might turn out… and you can see the results in the next few slides, along with their thoughts.

Stay tuned to io9 for more on Hasbro’s Selfie Series, as figures begin rolling out to customers in the coming months.

“I ordered one of these the first day it came out. Scratch that, the first hour it came out. Do I think I look good? God no. Is the hair right? God no. Is the scan serviceable to go on a super cool six-inch Hasbro figure that’s going to live on my shelf? Absolutely. Overall found the process pretty easy (almost too easy), super weird, not particularly accurate, but good enough.”

“I am not a selfie-taker, so snapping my own face as the app’s jaunty music and prompts goaded me on only added to the awkwardness. The resulting image bears little resemblance to what I actually look like, or what a human being actually looks like, and the hair is all wrong (what does Hasbro Pulse have against bangs)? But the little Ghostbuster outfit isn’t bad, I guess.”

“Pheeter Pharker waits at the bus stop for you to get home from work, and then awkwardly follows you from half a block back until you go into a bodega. He tries to follow you in, but the deli guy gives him that look so he scurries away in fear to watch girls go up and down the steps to the elevated train.”

“Designing an action figure of myself was something I was mildly interested in. Having tried other versions of a similar offering, I was always left disappointed in skin tone and some smaller features getting lost in the print. The Hasbro Pulse app was super easy to use; shout out to the download time soundtrack for the sick beats dropped. Not going to lie I found my mini-me to bear a surprisingly striking resemblance to me despite the five-head (but that may have been due to the angle I posed in).

And the skin tone matching is the closest to my hue of brown skin I’ve ever seen, at least in the mock-up. Whether it prints orange or yellowish remains to be seen but I’d definitely consider getting this if my hairstyle, which was only available on the Pink Ranger, could be applied to other IP figures. I at least got the chance to be a brown girl Power Ranger of my dreams.”