Multitouch 3D modeling

Ok, it's not much, but isn't this heading somewhere? I personally can't wait to have an organic modeler that works through using the designer's entire body as an interface a la Kinect.

Fabbing Piranesi's baroque fantasies

In his life in the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian artist and architect who produced some extremely ornamental designs for furniture and objects that were apparently never made. Now, under supervision of Micchele de Lucchi, these objects have actually been created using ZBrush 3D modeling software, rapid prototyping, and more traditional casting techniques.

Especially the 3D modeling process is exquisite to see, and with that music, it all feels meaningful too. We're truly entering a new renaissance.

Fluid fabbing

Home 3D fabbing hasn't really caught on yet with the main public, though companies like Ponoko and Studio Ludens are making progress. It's still mainly focused on creative people, who like to devote time to craft a personal object from scratch. The rest of the people still mostly lives according to the model of a standard consumer, who buys his products ready-made from the store. But the gap between making an object yourself on the one hand, and completely delegating the crafting process to a company on the other, is narrowing.

We start to see more and more companies allowing customers to customize the products before they buy them. Nike, Adidas, Puma and Converse, for example, now all allow people to build their own shoe through a special website. But this kind of customization is mostly limited to surface qualities like material and color. Where people want to also modify the shape of the product, they are mostly limited to creating their own 3D models.

A way to make the creation of 3D models more attractive, is to partially automate it. What's more, if we use sophisticated algorithms to develop a shape, we are not bound by a strict blueprint for the product, controlled by a human designer. Instead, we can let form design go wild inside the computer, and see what comes out. A beautiful form of this semi-automated fabbing is shown in the 'Fluid Vase' by Kwok Pan Fung. He created a series of meshes, based on the shape of a fluid gushing into a vase. These meshes then, become the vase that you can buy. Thus you see more of the dynamic qualities of the form as it interacts with things in the physical world, rather than the static form itself, based on abstractions. To the eye this looks quite puzzling, as your brain tends to think that because of the shape, this form should be moving as if it was a liquid. So if we let things go wild, much more mind-boggling and eye-opening things can pop up.

Embodied CAD modeling

When richer input devices emerge for human-computer interaction, applications like this physical CAD modeling system may come to the market. This tool was developed by Damon Millar as a first concept towards a physical modeling system with degrees of manipulation that we cannot yet imagine. Once we really bring the 4th dimension directly into the modeling system, we come a true cyborg craftsman with the ability to create anything we like in a matter of minutes.