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

this is rad

[Neuropol]

it's like etch-a-sketch, pilsbury brownie bake oven, and toothpaste all rolled in to one!

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")