3D Printers are becoming cheaper every day.

Just as college students swapping mp3s over university networks in the mid 90′s were half a decade ahead of the music industry, perhaps the popularity and strong community that have formed behind hobbyist 3D printer platforms are an indicator of things to come in the realm of tangible objects.

I have worked with 3D printers and the various tools that are available for duplicating, creating and editing the relatively specialized 3D geometry needed to create objects from them. From that experience I can say that while the challenges of hardware is primarily one of atoms (ie design a faster machine, develop better resolution, invent a wider variety of substrates etc) and solvable by traditional means. On the other hand, the challenge of the bits (how to develop flexible, usable and powerful tools that don’t require years of training and experience to use) is a lot more exciting and open-ended to me. Will we see exchanges like Google’s 3D Warehouse, or will companies spring up that specialize in creating, improving upon, and distributing 3D models of useful objects? Shapeways seems to fit this model, though I suspect at this point their service is a bit of a novelty and they are positioning themselves as a ‘creator of elegant curiosities’ rather than a ‘creator of unsexy-but-potentially-incredibly-useful objects.’

Read the full article at
Ars Technica – 3D fabbers: don’t let the DMCA stifle an innovative future

First, the fact that the complete interaction can be described so clearly in 40 seconds shows how novel and intuitive this little thing is. I don’t even need to describe what it does. It clearly combines form, interaction and customizability in one elegant package. It is in short – a great idea. However, while I won’t be surprised when I see something like this on a store shelf sometime soon, what struck me was the use of physical and digital prototyping tools to so completely and effectively express the idea.

The body is built with a 3D printer and the electronics are all off-the-shelf development tools such as Arduino and XBee, with the addition of an FM radio, accelerometer and speaker. None of these tools are custom and none of the technologies are opaque. In fact, all of the schematics, models and code are available on the Radioball Blog Entry. This entire project was realized by two people in a “short time” in order to serve as a “starting point for conversation about the need for richer, more spatial interactions.”

What I tend to write about are essentially tools to aid in, facilitate or speed up a traditional design process. What I find so exciting about Radioball is that an entire functional prototype was developed to describe the idea. I can write about tools that make 3D modeling easier, software to help you build walk-throughs, or electronics that you can use to aid in detailed user studies, but those are still essentially tools that aid an old-fashioned process. This thing is completely new, both in concept and execution. I can’t wait to see more projects like this and won’t hesitate to share what I find.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start building my parts list for building (and maybe improving upon) my own Radioball.

Much has been written about Sketchpad, Sutherland and all of the developments in HCI, computer science and engineering that continue to flow from his work. In the context of this site however, it’s important to note that Sutherland’s innovative engineering solutions were all driven by the desire provide people the ability to express themselves more intuitively with technology. The application precedes the solution.

“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.” –Ivan Sutherland.

ILoveSketch No-Cut Demo: Spacecraft from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

iLoveSketch was presented at the SIGGRAPH 2009 Emerging Technology Conference in New Orleans.

iLoveSketch is similar to SketchUp in that its primary goal is to transfer the cognitive burden of creating 3D forms from the left brain to the right. Users can easily view, create and manipulate 3D forms through gestural commands on a pen tablet. Common commands such as defining drawing planes, generating curves, trimming lines and creating surfaces can be done with one hand by variously looping, scribbling and ticking. The iLoveSketch system interprets these gestures and executes commands that with any other 3D modeling application would require some combination of keyboard commands or toolbars.

From the abstract:

We present EverybodyLovesSketch, a gesture-based 3D curve sketching system for rapid ideation and visualization of 3D forms, aimed at a broad audience. We first analyze traditional perspective drawing in professional practice. We then design a system built upon the paradigm of ILoveSketch, a 3D curve drawing system for design professionals. The new system incorporates many interaction aspects of perspective drawing with judicious automation to enable novices with no perspective training to proficiently create 3D curve sketches. EverybodyLovesSketch supports a number of novel interactions: tick-based sketch plane selection, single view definition of arbitrary extrusion vectors, multiple extruded surface sketching, copy-and-project of 3D curves, freeform surface sketching, and an interactive perspective grid. Finally, we present a study involving 49 high school students (with no formal artistic training) who each learned and used the system over 11 days, which provides detailed insights into the popularity, power and usability of the various techniques, and shows our system to be easily learnt (sic) and effectively used, with broad appeal.

Watch an interview with iLoveSketch’s principal researcher Seok-Hyung Bae, Ph.D.

iLoveSketch was produced at the University of Toronto’s Dynamic Graphics Project within the Department of Computer Science.

The community aspect of Scratch is cool as well – because the environment is java-based, kids can upload their creations to the scratch website and comment on each other’s creations. I’m interested in seeing if the sharing aspect of scratch can elevate to the next level, where kids can complete a series of tutorials in order to learn more advanced capabilities of the system. If the satisfaction of completing a programming challenge was as satisfying as completing a level in a video game, kids’ investment in Scratch might continue beyond the academic user-testing-group and community-outreach testing environment that it no doubt was born in.

Scratch can also be controlled by a custom hardware controller, allowing kids to create projects that are controlled by a slider, button, light sensor or microphone.

Scratch Website
SEE ALSO : Lego Mindstorms NXT

GEM achieves this time-savings with the help of an easy-to-use editing tool that allows designers to select from a library of shapes, physics attributes, and other elements from a simple drop-down Windows menu. They can also type in specifics to match real-world measurements and actions. [...] Workers training with GEM software navigate just as they would a PC game, using commands and keys that correspond with on-screen movement

There is one detail in the article that stood out for me that I felt that Jana touched on but didn’t give the attention I thought it deserved: While simulation systems are in wide use in the automotive and aerospace industries, where tolerances and safety concerns demand it and budgets allow it, with this project what Siemens is really doing is developing a simulation technology for the masses. This ‘democratization of simulation’ will open up new markets in mid- and small-scale factory operations that might otherwise not have been able to afford Siemens’ services. Much of what I wrtie about on this site is ephemeral or pie-in-the-sky, but if this project bears out, it will be a great example of ‘sketching’ technology enabling people to create real value on an industry-wide scale.

BusinessWeek.com : Siemens’ New Game Strategy

Some recent developments in the system are particularly exciting to me: I was exctied to see new support for Arduino, Phidgets and Wiring. The system was also on display at the 2006 Maker Faire in San Francisco, and a new hardware design (left) has been developed, which means that it lives on.

d.tools was developed at the Stanford HCI Group.

Check out this video. It’s a concept video that ETC students produced to demonstrate applications for Dynamic Physical Rendering, an Intel-funded research effort to develop ‘programmable matter’, technology for creating self-constructing 3D objects on the fly.Watching the video, I imagine the car designers offing themselves in their garages after their work is literally squashed and warped at the whim of a CEO. Regardless, assuming that something like this will become viable in the coming decades, I am interested to see the ‘software’ interface that enables you to reshape a 3D model by manipulating a physical object itself. When the corporate flunkie in the video tucks and shapes the car, how are they controlling what points on the model they are manipulating, or what tool they are using? Will a second input device be needed, or can the ‘claytronics’ hardware shape and color itself into a ‘hard’ software UI?

From an Interaction Design angle, this seems like the hardware analogue to Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research at MRL and other research at MIT’s Tangible Media Group and that the marriage of multi-touch and gestural interaction methods with dynamic physical rendering will open up stunning new methods of creating and shaping physical objects with human hands.

In the meantime, I wonder whether we aren’t better off just teaching people how to sculpt rather than creating advanced tools that do essentially the same thing?