“It's skin it's not plastic. It's alive. So when you touch it with a needle, there's a chance you're going to cut it up”
- Wes Thomas, Tattoo Artist
While at The Mill we teamed up with creative agency Anomaly Amsterdam to bring 5G closer to home and underpin T-Mobile’s reputation as The Netherland’s most trusted network. In order to do this, we developed ‘The Impossible Tattoo’: the world’s first-ever remote tattoo, powered by T-Mobile’s 5G technology.
As technical and creative director on the project I was involved from end to end. There were three lanes of initial development. Firstly we needed to work out how to track the tattoo artist's movements and detect when he was making contact with the surface of a fake practice arm and transmit this data over the network. Secondly, we had to develop a robotic platform that could receive this data in realtime and control the robot's movements in relation to the human arm. Thirdly we needed to develop a deep understanding of the fine details of tattooing.
The result was a fully functioning 5G tattooing robot that is showcased in a three-minute documentary-style film shot and directed by Alfie Johnson.