For my self portrait, I used Grasshopper to merge data from the Kinect (through Quokka) and from GIS map data (through the Meerkat Grasshopper plugin).

I first took a Kinect portrait of myself as a point cloud, baking it to keep it static.  Then I took that point cloud back into Grasshopper and generated a Delaunay mesh from it.  The mesh came out best when I manually rotated the point cloud in Rhino to be horizontal – but there were still some extra faces I had to delete between my hair and my face.  I then used the Mesh2NURB tool in Rhino to convert the mesh to a nurb sufarce.

Separately, I found the Grasshopper plugin Meerkat GIS on the Food4Rhino website.  Meerkat allows you to parse map shapefiles in Grasshopper and turn them into points, curves, or meshes.

I went on MapZen and got shapefiles for New York City (shapefiles are basically the map geometry data and metadata for an area).  I used the OSM2PGSQL SHP download after searching for New York.

I then used Meerkat to select a portion of my neighborhood of Prospect/Crown Heights and bring that data into Grasshopper as curves.

I then combined these two things manually in Rhino.  I extruded the curves of the map and then boolean intersected them with the nurb surface of my face.

Here’s what my Grasshopper layout looked like:

Meerkat portion:

And here’s the grasshopper file:

tyler_self_portrait_gh