Doodles Toy Factory

The short version

Doodles Toy Factory turns a photo of anything from real life into a custom character you can collect as a physical toy. Basically, it’s a real-life duplicator (or dooplicator), except it makes toys instead of exact copies. It’s sci-fi magic.

How to play

All you have to do is upload an image, and the factory turns it into an adorable Doodles character in a couple of minutes. This part is completely free. Then, you click “Buy now” and pay $129 + shipping to have it made and delivered to your door as a toy.

You can use any object, but given the art style of Doodles, it seems to work best with people and animals. There is an option to describe an original idea for your toy as well.

The future inside

In the future, anyone will be able to make a realistic copy of any physical object in minutes. That might be very useful when you’re stranded in space and need an urgent replacement part for your spaceship. Doodles Toy Factory is just a toy version of that future.

We’re actually not that far off today, even for serious use cases. We already have all of the necessary pieces. The problem is that 3D capture, modeling, and printing each take a ton of time and effort to get right. 3D printing in particular still takes a surprising amount of manual labor to produce and finish a good model.

The brilliance of Doodles Toy Factory is making this capability available to anyone with close to zero effort. It does this by constraining outputs to cartoon characters with an art style that is unusually friendly for 3D printing, and positioning the toys as premium collectibles to cover the cost of bespoke production.

Why it’s still a toy

The toys are made overseas, so with shipping + taxes to San Francisco, the total comes out to $167.87, and production + delivery can take up to 14 business days. It’s definitely not for everyone, and you’ll likely want to save it for a special occasion.