Sketch Your Furniture in the Air

justelite writes "Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialize free hand sketches."

Comments

Very Cool

[brunes69]

While all these technologies have been around for a few years, this has to be the coolest combination of them I have ever seen.

This is the type of story that kind of makes you sit back and realize what a wonderful age we're living in right now. Image - you can draw something in thin air and have it created on demand in a matter of hours. Sure - it's not perfect, and it's not economical to the average consumer, but neither were mobile telephones as little as 25 years ago.

Re:Sorry, but no

[brunes69]

Umm... I think you're reading too much into this. It's clearly just a proof of concept idea, nowhere does anything indicate these guys are trying to bring this to market anytime in the near future. For one thing, it would not be anywhere near economical - rapid prototyping is still expensive.

It's just a really cool demo of the kinds of things you may see in use in 5-10 years. I can see an interface where one would wear some 3-D goggles that would let them see what they were drawing not being too difficult to add, for example. In order for this to work though you would need to have in your toolset some primitives, like straight lines, circles, cubes, spheres, bezier curves, etc. Otherwise you'll end up with a mess.

This is fairly cool stuff

[Old Man Kensey]

I want to say this is lame -- look at those lopsided, asymmetrical forms, that bland whiteness! But on the other hand, there's something aesthetically pleasing about rounded, continuous, organic forms. Add to that, each piece is unique and "yours" in a way no furniture built from plans or in a certain style can ever be.

Now, there are refinements to be made. For one, interpreting the motion-capture as spline curves, instead of simple smoothed collections of points as they apparently are doing now, would allow for easy tweaking of the design. It would also allow imposing some automated corrections on the form, like "shift the top of this three-legged table until the center of gravity is on a line perpendicular to the plane of the legs which intersects that plane at the geometric center of the triangle defined by the ends of the legs" (which is to say, "make this three-legged table as stable as possible").

Or, "make all four legs of this chair coplanar in a plane parallel to the plane that best fits the seat, and make the geometric center of the seat lie on a line perpendicular to the plane of the ends of the legs that also contains the geometric center of the polygon defined by the ends of the legs" ("make the chair not wobbly and stable to sit on")

Interesting for design, but...

[onion2k]

I rather like the abstractness of the furniture they've mocked up, particularly the swirly chair thing, but I think this has a 'better' use. I'd love to see what sort of 3D forms it'd make from a ballet dancer or a gymnast. Turning graceful movement into sculpture would be fascinating.

Um, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

For this to be able to work you have to have some kind of tactile feedback. There is a reason none of the things they drew had straight lines or sharp corners.

Re:This is nice...

[Quince alPillan]

So why don't you learn to use a mouse with your right hand? While I'm not left handed, a friend of mine is and uses his mouse in his right hand. He types on the number pad with his right hand. Yet, he writes with his left and bowls with his left.

I mean, I can't use the keypad on a controller (PS2, etc) with my right hand, but I'm sure I could learn it if I tried (or had a reason to).