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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."
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I always want more ways to do freehand computer interfaces because I am considered disabled by the fascists who design high end interface devices.
The Righties keepin'us down.
it's like etch-a-sketch, pilsbury brownie bake oven, and toothpaste all rolled in to one!
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.
Hmm... you could probably generate some fairly interesting pseudo-classical sculpture that way.
Man, does that ever open a can of copyright worms... Methinks you'd have to be careful to start with a photograph you own the rights to, or that you've already licensed "derivative works" rights to.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
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")
-- Old Man Kensey
Let me draw you a chair...
You don't need a holographic projection - much simpler would be to wear LCD goggles that display what you're sketching, either on it's own or overlaid on reality, combined with what other people in the same room are sketching.
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This was the concept that propelled Autodesk into working on virtual reality in the 1980s. Drawing in 3D on a screen required (and still requires) a complex interface; gestures in 3D looked like a way to make it a freehand job.
Didn't work. Humans can't draw with any degree of precision in 3D free space. Clay sculpting works because of tactile feedback; it's not a pure eye/hand thing. And drawing in 3D free space gets really tiring within minutes. Technically, you can get the hardware and software to work. But it's too hard on the users.
So virtual reality CAD R&D was dropped.
Can it draw a bath?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I want to know what the machine is from which the chair seems to rise from a pool of white goo. That's amazing -- what is it called? How much do they cost?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sorry if this has been said, but couldn't the designers head position also be tracked by the cameras so a view from their prospective could be fed back to a heads up display? This would allow for a real time overlay of what was being designed to be seen on top of the real space. Could be much more useful, almost like making a sculpture. This would be similar to a technique used in LOTR to shoot using a hand held camera in a virtual environment.