SleepyEgg

At CES, Sculpteo, a French company specializing in additive manufacturing—otherwise known as 3D printing—was showing off a new smartphone app that allows the uninitiated to create personalized, usable ceramic objects from a photo. The firm was also demonstrating a new "cloud engine" that allows designers and small businesses to create customized products they can sell through their own websites—basically aiming to become the Etsy of the 3D printing world.

The app side of Sculpteo's pitch is fairly gimmicky: snap a photo of someone in profile with an iPhone or Android device, and the app will recognize the profile. Then it exports data derived from the image so that the user can create a custom object based on it, derived from prebuilt designs. Those include a coffee cup with the profile in relief and a vase made from a rotational volume of the profile.