As many of you know, Travis Reinke and SCANable have put their 3D scanners to work for a lot of cool projects. They’ve scanned mixed martial-arts fighters, supermodels, and now, they’ve worked on my new favorite TV show.
HBO’s Westworld is set in an amusement park in the near future where lifelike cyborgs act out old west narratives. Guests in the park are invited to interact with the cyborgs in any way they want. The cyborgs are put to sleep at night, cleaned up, rebuilt, and sent back out into the park the next day to repeat. Until they start becoming self-aware.
If it sounds like a Michael Crichton story (“Jurassic Park but with people”), you’re right. It’s based on a film made by Crichton back in the ‘70s. But where that movie was campy, this one is eerie and unsettling—in a number of ways you might not expect.
Westworld is gorgeous, and looks like a difficult show to make. In fact, Reinke tells me that SCANable has been working on the show for a few years already. “We scanned most of the sets, props, and actors that were used in the show and the beautiful title sequence, which is a piece of art all by itself.”
For the intro, he says SCANable scanned the piano, the skeleton figures, and the Vitruvian Man rotating in the ring. Watch below to see what those 3D scans turned into.