www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PWaU4u5QVo

Attendees firstly capture their favorite pose using a Microsoft Kinect. The depth image from the Kinect is processed into a mesh and displayed onscreen in real-time. At any time they can capture the mesh and save it as an STL file.

Dovetail joints are automatically added to the side of the models so they can be snapped together. This allows multiple models to be connected to form a larger overall model.

The STL files were printed using a Dimension uPrint 3D printer kindly provided by Stratasys.

Below you can see the models packed on to the 3D printing base. The printer was working night and day during the conference as we kept it fed with numerous models created by attendees.

As we wanted to be able to fabricate a large number of models, we kept the size of the pieces down to approximately 3x3cm.

To print at the 3x3cm size we only needed to use one quarter of the full Kinect resolution. Below are renderings of the models created by attendees, as you can see they are quite low resolution due to the print size.

For those interested, a render of a full resolution model is shown below. The holes are due to occlusion of the projected IR light and general depth camera noise.

Finally below is an image of all the models we managed to print during the conference (and several print jobs we ran after it).

Ideally we would like to be able to produce these much much faster. Despite the long print times, people would return frequently to check if their model was finished. The excitement of creating something and instantly seeing the results is something we are all familiar with; be it with Polaroid cameras or Purikura stickers. Unfortunately for 3D printing it seems we are still some way off this reality.

Created by Karl D.D. Willis.
The project took place during January 2011 in Funchal, Portugal.
Software developed using openFrameworks.
Thank you to Ian Oakley, Nicolas Villar, James Scott, Mark Gross and Cheng Xu for getting this project off the ground and keeping it running during the conference.
Also a big thank you to Stratasys for providing the 3D printer.
Photos from the venue courtesy of TEI 2011 and Brian Lim.

The process begins with a short sound recording. The waveform is analyzed and the section heights mapped out to form the different sized beads.

The beads themselves are cut using a laser cutter. Materials with different colors and thicknesses are available; thinner materials allow for a more accurate representation of the waveform.

The project was first created in 2008 and released via Ponoko. This early version supplied the necklace in a very cute flat-pack cutout for the customer to assemble.

The production process has evolved with more recent versions so that the 13 different sizes of beads are pre-cut for quick assembly and delivery. Although the process seems inherently computational, it is actually done manually by Bizer himself. He creates screen-shots of the waveforms and then overlays stencils of the beads in Photoshop.

Not surprisingly the majority of sounds submitted by customers are love messages, with music samples a distant second. The poetic nature of encoding an intangible message into a tangible form is enormously appealing. The Shaper and Trikoton projects also explore this rich space, albeit with very different form and results.

Thank you to David for your time, and also to Tiago for pointing this project out to us.

The One Liner Bowls have a very distinct process that begins with the recording of a drawn 3D path using a Microscribe G2 input device and Rhino.

From there the 3D line is extruded and unrolled to create a flat piece of geometry representing the varying height of the 3D line.

The unrolled geometry is then cut out from bendable 0.5mm stainless steel sheet with a CNC laser. The top down projection of the 3D line is cut from stiff 6mm medium density fiberboard (MDF) and used as a collar so the steel sheet can be rolled up again, inserted, and held in place.

Above you can see the individual pieces and the assembled model of the original 3D line is shown below.

The next step is to create a mold that can be used in a kiln. Refractory plaster is cast around the stainless steel sheet ring and the flammable MDF collar is removed. Once in the kiln, circular 6mm flat glass is placed on the steel ring and through ‘free fall slumping’ bent into place with heat and gravity.

After cooling, the excess glass hanging over the edges can be kept as is or trimmed to create the final bowl form.

The One Liner Bowls beautifully combine digital fabrication techniques with traditional craft. It is a refreshing approach to see such an emphasis on the materials used with digital fabrication:

I believe materiality is a very important aspect in all physical creative output. But at the moment there is little focus on the aesthetic qualities of the materials used in the digital fabrication process. This is particularly the case with Rapid Prototyping. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is perhaps the worst example, with truly awful aesthetic qualities.

Jorgensen’s approach stems from his background in craft, and in particular pottery. However this is problematic for the new generation of artists and designers who lack this background and have learned ‘sculpting’ through digital fabrication.

I believe that intimate knowledge of materials is one of the central aspects that craft skills provides the creative practitioner – both in terms of the structural and aesthetic properties. If you have developed all your work virtually via CAD without any material knowledge then you are likely to get a very nasty surprise when it comes to realize the designs in the physical world.

Jorgensen suggests we must also adapt our skills to the changing tool-set:

On the other hand I’m not a fan of preserving craft skills just for the sake of it. Humans have throughout history developed skills in response to needs, so if a particular craft skill is no longer relevant then I see no reason why we should try to artificially preserve it. Instead we should develop new hand skills which relate to the changing technology. I believe new hand skills could have a great role to play in combination with emerging digital fabrication techniques.

The One Liner Bowls clearly demonstrate how new craft skills and processes can be developed together with digital fabrication technology. The bowls themselves are still being sold and the process continuously refined. Contact Tavs Jorgensen for more information. Thank you for your time Tavs!

Similar to a wedding ring the inscription can not be read while wearing it. The jewelry’s owner on the other hand knows the personal message and is therefore constantly aware of the emotional value of this ring.

The content is used to define the ring shape. The previously hidden inscription becomes visible, but with a message only known to the ring wearer. The rendering below shows the ‘Love’, ‘Peace’, and ‘Unity’ rings.

The rings are modeled manually using Rhino, by firstly arranging the letters radially and then lofting them. The resulting model is then 3D printed in wax and finally cast.

Bizers work strikes a very poetic note and is well suited to production with one-off digital fabrication techniques. Despite the highly symbolic and personal meaning of wedding rings, they remain a mass produced product – but for how much longer?

Cell Cycle currently has an online interface available and an iPad app is also in development. The video below shows the iPad interface in action at their recent Reaction exhibit.

Jessica Rosenkrantz, one of the founders of Nervous System was kind enough to speak to us about their approach to design.

All of our product lines, whether they are “pre-designed” or custom are generated by software that we write. I think it’s nice for people to see and engage in the same design process we use.

Rosenkrantz makes an interesting observation about customer behavior:

I would say many of our customers enjoying playing with the three tools we have for custom fabrication online but end up purchasing one of the designs we have pre-created. [...] Sometimes I wonder if this is because the software applications aren’t the most user-friendly or if people just don’t have confidence in their designing abilities.

Nervous System’s applications refine the creation process into a smooth, yet powerful workflow. There really is no valid comparison to the infinitely more complex, conventional CAD design process. Customer apprehension could be compared to gastronomy. We may enjoy dabbling in the kitchen at home, but if we are to dine at an expense, we have certain expectations that makes going to a professional chef a logical choice. Likewise for design, it may make sense for customers to get a signed and certified Nervous System piece.

Being able to produce one-of-a-kind pieces is one of the main advantages of digital fabrication. The use of computational processes lends itself to Nervous System’s iterative design approach. In many respects the software process is the ‘original’ and each physical piece is an iteration of this meta-design process.

Certainly, people seem to really love having a one of a kind design though. Our Dendrite line has two series of necklaces in it the Full moon necklaces and Coral necklaces where each piece is one of a kind and those has been very popular with more than 1300 unique pieces having been sold already.

These are impressive figures and Nervous System has been able to expand their business to meet customer demand. But perhaps the real question people out there may want to know is: When a customer creates a design, what happens between ‘add to cart’ and ‘ring of door bell’?

When the customer clicks add to cart the data from the unsmoothed mesh is saved to our database in OBJ format. And it shows up in our order processing site with the rest of our regular non-custom orders. We download the OBJ and run it through a processing applet on our side that runs the catmull subdivisions to produce the smoothed mesh and saves it to an STL. We upload the STL to shapeways.

Images courtesy of Nervous System
Thanks for your time Jessica!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwoyhTJvCIo

The label began from the Gelsomina project presented at Ars Electronica in 2007. An old mechanical knitting machine was hacked with a microcontroller and 24 small engines imitating a pattern card to directly control the device by live user input.

The project has since evolved to encompass installation and web based interfaces. Visitors to the Trikoton site can record their voice and have it encoded into the garment they order.

Numerous online retails allow visitors to design their own clothing using online interfaces, but using a computational process to encode speech is an interesting and novel modality that we ourselves have explored with the Speaker project. The end product they create looks to be of especially high quality and fuses together handmade with mass produced.

What is missing from the site is a gallery of works created. We would be especially interested to see what words people choose to encode, and whether their choice is based on the aesthetic of the design or the words themselves.

Thanks to Olivier Bau for pointing this project out to us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=REI4rJVXQJg

The model itself is presented on the main display rather than on the controller itself; this prevents occlusion of the model when sculpting with the whole hand. The controller screen does not need to be viewed while sculpting, meaning the controller can be rotated or flipped to sculpt from a range of angles. Currently the model is constructed using metaballs (thanks Golan!), but this is just one approach for gestural input to be transformed into geometry.

Beautiful Modeler and the Beautiful Controller were created using openFrameworks. The finished mesh can be exported as an STL file (thanks to ofxSTL), meaning the sculpted form can be fabricated immediately. In the video above, the positive mesh has been post-processed to create a negative form for fabrication with a plaster-based 3D printer (thanks Zach!).

A simple circuit is then affixed inside the form to create a lamp. The shadows cast by the negative lamp shape reflect the original positive form.

Created by: Karl D.D. Willis
Special Thanks: Golan Levin, Wayne Chung, and P. Zach Ali
Download: Beautiful Modeler Source Code (Updated April 26, 2011)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuGvPhglGEc

They published a paper at the CHI conference in 2005 entitled ‘Dishmaker: Personal Fabrication Interface’. There is an interesting quote from the related work section that frames the problem Interactive Fabrication seeks to address:

The idea of rapid prototyping has led to a number of different products already affordable by research laboratories and educational institutions.  These employ sophisticated modeling and fabrication to produce accurate, complex forms in small quantities over large periods of time.  At the same time, the objects are homogenous lumps of paper, plaster or plastic and require intensive training and post-processing.

Five years on this is still very much the case. Despite much evangelizing about the ‘Desktop Fabrication Revolution’, the reality is that there is still a great amount of technical expertise required.

I don’t find the Dishmaker particularly compelling, but it does raise some important issues. Namely, designing for the entire life-cycle of the product -- in this case creating a dish that can be reformed into another shape. The ability to undo a form in the physical world is non-trivial. Also important is the design of fabrication systems that are not one-size-fits all -- in this case they created a specific solution with a variable pressure-mold system. Unfortunately the interface is very generic in the form of a standard touchscreen.

The process is akin to Slit-scan photography where small slices of time are built up to form a whole image. In this case the slices are full two-dimensional outlines that are offset to form a three-dimensional shape.

I (and possibly many others) am fascinated by works that present a different representation of time – super slow motion and time lapse are common examples but the slit-scan technique has attracted a huge number of artists. I believe the attraction lies in perceiving the known world in new ways.

Extending these ideas to the physical realm is an interesting direction and one that I envision will continue well into the future as we develop more sophisticated actuation and fabrication technology.