Hasta La Ideas

We picked up on Samuel Bernier’s “Project RE_” even before he was recognized as Runner-Up in the DIY category of this year’s Core77 Design Awards, and he might just be in contention for 2013 with his latest project, “Dentelle.” Taking it’s name from the French word for lace, the project was inspired by a simple repair job:

When I moved in my new apartment, the last owner had left [an IKEA] Rigolit lamp in the middle of the living room. An object that looks like a fishing rod holding a big paper cloud. The lampshade was ripped everywhere and Scotch tape was holding it together. This huge volume was always in the way and we kept bumping our heads into it. One day, I had enough and decided to buy a new lampshade to replace the paper one. Everything was either too expensive for me or extremely ugly. Also, the closest IKEA was an hour away… by bus.

What does a designer do in such a situation? He makes! A few hours later, thanks to affordable 3D printing, a unique lampshade was made. I couldn’t stop there, so I designed 2, 3… 12 different ones, using always the same shape and changing only the color and the texture. They take between 4 and 12 hours to print, use absolutely no support material, weight between 50g and 100g and cost less than $5 to print.

As in his “Project RE_,” Bernier’s approach captures the spirit of the Fixer’s Manifesto to a tee, revitalizing a superficially damaged object with ingenuity, a bit of elbow grease (and a spool of ABS, of course).

(more…)

In the 1870s you needed to be a big shot to have your portrait taken, and in the 1970s you needed to star in something made by 20th Century Fox to have an action figure of yourself. But here in 2012, technology has advanced to combine those things for the average consumer.

On November 24th, Eye of Gyre, an art exhibition space in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood, is pulling the sheets off of their 3D Shashin-kan. Literally translated as “3D Picture Space,” it’s what they’re calling the world’s first 3D-printing photo booth. Visitors can have their “portraits” taken in the form of whole-body scanning, and end up with a detailed figurine of them in 10-, 15- or 20-centimeter heights, depending on how much they’d like to pay.

Instant gratification this ain’t, as the figurines will take a month or more for fulfillment and delivery. (We’re guessing that they need to clean up the scan, and that an artisan paints the colors on after printing.) There’s also a capturing restriction similar to when daguerrotypes were first developed: The subject must remain completely still during the scanning process, which is six minutes in this case, meaning Fido-san and small children are not ideal capture subjects. Beyond that, reflective clothes, wire-rim eyeglasses, hoop earings, fine patterns, and fur are all no-nos, because these either muck with the scanning process or are impossible to faithfully reproduce under their system.

Visitors will need to sign up in advance here, but you’d better hurry: The exhibition closes on January 14th, and the slots are filling up quickly.

via spoon & tamago

(more…)

Wearable electronics still aren’t ready for primetime, but until they are, here’s a clever bridge product: Shapeways user Egant’s Button 2.0, which features a precisely-dimensioned groove in one side, providing handy cable-clipping capability for your headphones.

It’s totally one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-this head-smackers, but I have a feeling that as more and more of us get 3D printers, it won’t matter….

(more…)

All images via Disney Research

Speaking of 3D printing, this is pretty amazing: a team of designers and engineers at Disney Research have recently published a remarkable paper entitled “Printed Optics: 3D Printing of Embedded Optical Elements for Interactive Devices.” (Just as their amusement parks are located in the family-friendly tourist destinations of Florida and Southern California, the entertainment company’s research division is strategically located in close proximity to Carnegie Mellon University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich.) Karl D.D. Willis, Eric Brockmeyer, Scott Hudson and Ivan Poupyrev are based in the Pittsburgh lab, and the highly technical 10-page paper [PDF] is as dense as one might expect. From the Printed Optics project page:

Printed Optics is a new approach to creating custom optical elements for interactive devices using 3D printing. Printed Optics enable sensing, display, and illumination elements to be directly embedded in the body of an interactive device. Using these elements, unique display surfaces, novel illumination techniques, custom optical sensors, and robust embedded components can be digitally fabricated for rapid, high fidelity, customized interactive devices.

Printed Optics is part of our long term vision for the production of interactive devices that are 3D printed in their entirety. Future devices will be fabricated on demand with user-specific form and functionality. Printed Optics explores the possibilities for this vision afforded by today’s 3D printing technology.

“A 3D printed mobile projector accessory with embedded light pipes. Projected imagery is mapped onto the character’s eyes. The character responds to user interaction such as sound or physical movement.”

For those of us who don’t know DSM Somos’ Watershed XC11122 from 3D Systems’ Accura ClearVue, they’ve produced a brilliant, semi-viral video for our edification:

Besides the interactive applications of 3D printed optics, the Disney Researchers have also developed a handful of lightbulbs, an easy metaphor for their insight.

(more…)

In the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire John Malkovich played Mitch Leary, an ex-CIA assassin hiding out as, get this, a design professor at Art Center in Pasadena. In the film Leary’s said to be quite the modelmaker, and the plot has him cobbling together the plastic gun you see above (presumably in Art Center’s ID shop?), in order to attack the President.

The movie’s prop master, Frank Rousseau, designed the dummy gun so that it could actually fire blanks. According to an auction site selling the prop off, “It required 96 hours of machine work and 72 hours of construction to manufacture.”

That was in 1993; today, with a good 3D printer, that 96 plus 72 hours of work would be greatly reduced. Which is frightening. And here’s the bad news: Cody Wilson, a law student at UT Austin, is on a mission “to disseminate a printable gun design online.”

Wilson spearheads the Wiki Weapon movement, which raised $20,000 and used it to lease a Stratasys 3D printer last month. He made no secret of the project’s aims, which are to create a 3D-printed pistol capable of getting off a single shot (the plastic ABS used in 3D printing would melt after that). Stratasys was not amused, and after some contentious correspondence, they sent repo men to strip Wilson of their printer, citing U.S. firearms laws.

While Wilson has been questioned by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the legality of 3D-printing a firearm is currently a legal grey area. But lawmakers had better figure this thing out soon; Wilson is determined to move forward with his project, and the prospect of anyone with a 3D printer being able to secretly manufacture their own deadly weapons, with no practical way for authorities to apply oversight, is a potential powderkeg of trouble.

via danger room

(more…)