Celebrating Beast’s sixth birthday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Oculus in order to 3D print a miniature model of his pet dog. Beast is a Hungarian Sheepdog and it seems fair to say that his birthday has cleverly been used as a marketing tool for the new Oculus Medium software. The model was printed at Facebook’s recently opened 404 Lab, headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
Virtual reality is gaining momentum as a novel environment for 3D designing. Recently we looked at how Dassault Systèmes are working with the HTC VIVE. The ‘3DEXPERIENCE’ was unveiled at CES and enables 3D designing through a VR headset and hand controllers.
Mark Zuckerberg explained how he outsourced the project to the staff at Oculus, who Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, in a Facebook post accompanying the video,
It’s Beast’s 6th birthday! A few weeks ago, an artist at Oculus designed and printed a 3D sculpture in VR. Beast was pretty confused, but I love that we have the technology and culture where people just make things like this for fun. And I think it’s pretty good!
Oculus Medium
Oculus have only recently announced the Oculus Medium software for VR modelling and 3D designing and it seems the new product hasn’t quite received the attention hoped. Leading Zuckerberg to turn instead to his cuddly dog Beast to attract interest. The Facebook founder definitely still knows how the Internet works.
The exact 3D printer being used by Zuckerberg is unclear with the model appearing to be printed inside a wax material before being post-processed. While the dog was probably hoping to receive a more conventional present in the form of a meat-bone treat, there’s always next year. Perhaps for his seventh birthday Beast will be presented with a 3D printed meat model of himself.
3DPI are celebrating our 5th birthday soon and we too have exciting plans to be revealed soon. Stay tuned to our social media, find us on Facebook and Twitter.
Update: thanks to eagle-eyed readers who identified the printer as a Stratasys J750, 5 color, 6 material Polyjet 3D printer.
Featured image shows the model of Beast during post-processing. Screenshot via Facebook.
