3D Printing Wizardry

3D printing, 3D printing, 3D printing. It seems to be the magic word of the year, as it pops up more and more regularly in the tech, investment, and general news blogs. 3D printing startups are coming up like wild mushrooms too - I have joined the party as well.

3D printing is currently at the top of the so-called 'hype-cycle' and will soon reach the 'Trough of Disillusionment' where it is no longer used because it is cool, but the technology will truly have to prove itself in the real world. I am not talking about the professional market, as 3D printing has already proven itself to be an excellent method for early prototyping over the last 20 years. I am talking about 3D printed products that will have to enter and survive in the real world of consumers.

For this to happen, 3D printed items will need to beat products manufactured through other processes mainly in terms of the following factors:

1. Subjective appeal: aesthetics, carrying out a personal identity

2. Functional performance

3. Profitability

The most interesting application areas that have a chance are in my view the following:

• Toys. Subjective appeal is enormous since toys can be customized or designed by the end user himself. Also, toys can be easily expanded upon through the creation of all kinds of accessories. In a few years there will probably be an affordable and safe 3d printable material that comes close to the mechanical and aesthetic qualities of injection molded plastic, better than the currentday sintered powders or extruded filaments. Especially toys that have multiple moving components but do not require tight tolerances are interesting candidates for 3D printing, since it can integrate multiple components and in the future also multiple materials in a single print, which removes the assembly line. So also concerning functionality 3D printing could meet the standards. In terms of profitability, 3D printing is better suited for small objects that require less material and machine time. But it will still be a quite expensive technique for several years to come and therefore most interesting for items that already have a high price. The action figure industry is one likely to be taken over by 3D printing.
• Jewelry. For jewelry, 3D printing meets all three factors, as long as they are items without moving mechanisms. It will soon be possible to print all kinds of precious metals in all kinds of beautifully complex shapes, for a competitive price.

• Formfitting wearables. Unique benefits of 3D printing are that it can be produced on demand, and there is hardly any restriction in terms of geometry. An already successful example is hearing aids, of which thousands have been produced through 3D printing. Another example is high-performance shoes for athletes or people with disabilities, who can have their feet scanned and then have a shoe created to exactly fit them. Jake Evill recently introduced a concept for a lightweight and beautiful 3D printed arm cast, which would replace the old-fashioned and clunky plaster-based ones. This concept is too expensive to put into practice by hospitals, but could be done if patients are interested to pay, say $100 extra for a special and more breathable cast. Maybe then, friends and family could 'rent' a piece of the casting and make their own piece to fit into it with their own printer, with a name or message.

• Gift items. 3d Printing offers the unique feature of being able to personalize a gift item through 3d form, rather than 2D techniques such as engraving and cutting. The price of most of these items could be competitive if they are relatively small, and smartly designed to save material. Examples are figurines of people or pets with their name on it, 3d printed chocolates, and ceramic items such as mugs.

   

• Exclusive 'collector item' designs. There will always be a market for luxury, avant-garde items, where people pay $5000 for an exclusive 3d printed vase, table, or shoe. Designers following organic design philosophies can shine here, such as seen in the works of Freedom of Creation and Nervous System. In the fashion world Iris van Herpen is the straddling towards fully 3D printed clothing, and in the world of musicians there is Olaf Diegel who seems to be doing good business creating unique 3D printed guitar casings.

• Architecture. I very much believe in the idea of 3D printed dwellings such as put forward by prof. Behrokh Khoshnevis. They can be created in only a few days, and easily customized according to the wishes of the prospective owner.
  

  

• Electronics casings. As a product designer it is sort of a dream of mine that the evolution of products continues to follow biological evolution. As such, our current-day mostly crustacean-like objects with outer shells acting like exoskeletons will be supplemented by more intelligent and versatile objects that have internal skeletons and a sensitive, adaptive and interactive skin. 3D printing may play a part in that because it allows for lots of small interconnected parts, instead of one single shell. Before that happens though, casings will become adaptable in terms of ergonomic shape and decorative elements. It may only be profitable for smaller handheld devices such as shavers, electric toothbrushes and tablets.

• Spare parts. As 3D modeling is becoming a more and more ubiquitous skill and 12-year olds are already doing it (I started at 16), average consumers will start to recreate all kinds of items around them that may at some point need replacing, and are hard to come by. Of course intellectual property issues will create some resistance, but I think that in the end we will just end up with an enormous database of all kinds of 3D printable spare parts.

These are all exciting developments and show the potential scope of 3D printed applications. Even more exciting is that if we apply ideas from media theory to 3D printing, it may be likely that manufacturing based on 3D printing will be so different from current-day, mostly linear, production techniques, that it will radically change our technological lifeworld in a way almost impossible to predict. Where now we look at the technology and imagine objects we know to be constructed in that fashion, as I basically have done with this text, completely new types of objects and systems may arise that we could hardly have predicted beforehand. We can only keep our eyes and minds open so that ideas can come to us, and the developments accelerate.

And a final side note: 3d printing as an idea was not completely invented by Chuck Hull in the mid 1980's; also here science fiction was first! In a 1964 Superman comic, the hero creates 3D busts from 2D photographs as gift items for his friends:

Neri Oxman shows 3D printing in its full glory

Neri Oxman, professor at the MIT Media Lab, has recently gone on a 3D printing spree and created a beautiful collection of objects that represent the state of the art of this additive manufacturing process. More than that, it is an interesting conceptual probe into a future where we can interweave these sorts of objects more and more with our own bodies, as 3D printing allows a sophistication in design approaching that found in nature. Professor Oxman has shown that now we can produce objects of unlimited geometrical complexity, consisting of different materials that can smoothly transition in terms of properties such as hardness, thickness, or color.

Now the first 3D printers that are interesting to the mainstream consumer have emerged on the market, we will need to see how this democratization of design will turn out. Are we entering a future where everyone will become a designer through trial and error, and even more throw-away objects are produced with these technologies than happened after the plastics revolution, or will people learn faster this time and be more careful in what they create? With this creative power comes responsibility, of course, and it might be that because people are so closely involved in the making process that it helps them taking on this responsibility, just like, say, you take responsibility for the quality of the turkey you make for Thanksgiving; it has to be exquisite. Same goes for creating objects with our 3D printers - let's all take Neri Oxman's work as a good example of the objects to come.

Eight objects of the collection, called "Imaginary Beings," have been included in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, so it might be worth paying a visit during your next trip to Paris. Also, here is a video that shows you the objects in more detail:

Also check out her personal website, where you can see some other interesting projects she has been involved in, some of them venturing more away from raw art and towards contextualized, embodied product design. A beautiful example is the Carpal Skin glove, that can be made uniquely according to the physiological requirements of each user.

Eccerobot: an embodied approach to artificial intelligence

The current prototype of the anthropomorphic Eccerobot, born in the labs of the ETF robotics research group at the university of Belgrade, Serbia, shows an interesting approach to robot design. The developers chose to approach the project not just from the idea that more and better computational intelligence leads to a better design, but that intelligent behavior is for a large part dependent on the physical embodiment of a robot. So rather than creating a robot with stiff parts and very sophisticated actuators and control software, they designed the torso to be flexible, including muscles and tendons that connect the actuators to the plastic bones through ropes and pulleys.

Let's be cyborgs

"Let's go for the future, let's be cyborgs" was the closing statement of professor Kevin Warwick after he talked about his recent explorations in wiring up his nervous system to electronic systems. He had a device with an array of electrodes implanted into the median nerve of his left arm, which allowed his nervous signals to be read electronically. Then, he was able to operate several things remotely by moving his hand. He went on to link his state of arousal to the color of a necklace his wife was wearing, so that she would always know if he was in a calm or excited state. His next step was to also put the electrodes in his wife's arm, and set up a primitive communication system. Whenever one person squeezes their hand, the other person would feel this as pulses inside the brain. This then should be a first step towards direct brain-to-brain communication in order to complement the "pathetic, trivial, serial coded pressure wave form" that speech is, according to Kevin Warwick. Watch the video here:

Transcendental Technology

Michael Harboun has made a leap into the future in developing the 'Transcendenz' concept for his thesis project at the Parisian design school Strate College. He envisions special glasses that read your brainwaves and can alter what you see through augmented reality technology. These glasses are transformative on a deep personal level because it can take people deeper into their consciousness, away from the distractions of the everyday world. It can make them explore their own mind, learn from other great minds in human history, as well as share their explorations with other mind-travellers. Then it uses augmented reality to show the applicability of the learned ideas and concepts in real life. As people learn to adopt these new ideas and incorporate them into their own being, they progress through various levels, like in a video game. This way, technology can be an incredibly powerful tool for psycho-spiritual development.

In the visionary designer's own words:

"In a world in which we are constantly bombarded with injunctions to react or to distract ourselves it gets scarcely possible in our everyday life to dwell upon the essential, the existential, the metaphysical. Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes can't see." - Michael Harboun

To see how it works, watch the video:



We can see how advanced this technological proposal is if we link it to humanity's history. People started off on this planet in a great struggle with their environment, with the first technologies serving mainly to gather food and protect the social environment. The ancient Greeks were among the first to employ rational thinking instead of using a belief in something immaterial to get through life. This liberated them more from the personal emotional system, and brought them mentally more in tune with the physical world. In the 17th century, this was more thoroughly established through the invention of the scientific method by Descartes. This made people enter a new world-view, where they started to see that there was not necessarily a God-entity out there. The challenge for people now became to explore and control the world themselves, which was a great empowerment. This control culminated during the 20th century, where technological progress boomed and survival on a material level was not really an issue any longer in modernized societies.

So then technology could develop further to fulfill needs on a higher level. Electronics replaced expensive mechanisms, and where before certain objects would have to crafted by a master and would thus only be available to a select few people, now products became mass-produced and available to anyone with just a little bit of money. On a massive scale people obtained technologies for personal entertainment, learning, professional development, and social networking. This liberated people further, this time from the local social environment, and had them develop into strong individuals. In Maslow's terms, technology was now widely used to fulfill esteem and self-actualization needs.

But we were still mostly tied to the physical world as our conscious plane of existence. Science treated the world as an object that can be understood and controlled like a mechanism, and as a result people worked very hard to sustain all the material flows in order to keep everybody fed and protected. This also created a lot of leisure time, and as Michael Harboun also notes, people just don't have much of an idea how to fill that up meaningfully, and as a result dive into one distraction after the other. Once the objective plane was taken care of, people came consciously more in touch with their own subjectivity, but there was no technological guide yet for this plane of existence.

Often people just remain in a fun state of flow, filling their time with one activity after the other, leaving the subjective plane mostly unexplored. Science has not yet included this plane into its description of the world, although it's getting there slowly, arguably also through quantum physics. Science has ignored the mind as being part of the world, ever since Descartes posed the mind-body duality as the solution. But now it is time to include mind into our techno-scientific body, because the thing about the mind is; you can't locate it anywhere, yet it unmistakably exists. It might even be directly related to the world you perceive 'outside', and these are the kinds of realizations that the Transcendenz system would stimulate.

By making us aware of things like they are and not like they seem, the concept invites us to transcend our world. Transcendenz also enables us to access the knowledge of history's great philosophers, who, since antiquity, try to answer the question: Why is there something, if there could be nothing?" - Michael Harboun





Project link

Nokia's bendable displays

Nokia has been working on bendable displays for a while, and have now managed to go from concept to working demonstrator for this technology. The 'Nokia Kinetic' concept is a flexible rectangular device with a bendable touch screen. They kept interaction simple by using only twisting and horizontal bending motions as input, besides touching and sliding. Especially bending the device in order to zoom in and out seems a very natural mapping from action to function, as you either press away or bring closer the center of the screen.

Another device that Nokia has presented with this concept is a beautiful borderless flexible display. This display is embedded in a soft and transparent skin-like material that can detect a finger pressing into it and then stretching the skin in various directions. This may greatly enrich and simplify browsing interactions.



The Nokia Kinetic gives us a good glimpse of where our technological devices are headed. Softer, more expressive, and no more being confining us only to rapid sequential movements for input, technology is about to engage more of our bodily skill. Instead of the miniaturization of devices, there might be more potential in fitting our technology better to our bodies, and making it soft and adaptable.

Watch the movies here:

Robots to guard prisoners

This cute little fellow here is, believe it or not, the start of prisons being run by robots. It is going to be tested in an actual prison in South Korea, where it will assist in keeping an eye on the inmates through various intelligent systems. Especially at nighttime, this may relieve the human guards of their duties, leaving them more room to do things like reading psychology books, doing some prison yoga, or painting pictures of inmates.

It may seem counterintuitive to have such a jolly looking 5-feet tall character guard the scum of our society. But I would like to think of it as the start of a whole new paradigm of treating people who have committed acts that we classify as 'criminal'. Now they are often treated like they have done something 'wrong', according to a system of punishment and reward, not unlike parents treat little children. But this does not work very well for the criminals, because they often have already stepped out of this paradigm of human interaction in the first place. In Jungian terms, they have stopped living as only their persona, and started facing the shadow side of the personality. This confrontation can be very challenging, and when repressions are loosened it is easier to tip over into criminal acts. Seen from this perspective, we can come to understand that many criminals have psychologically taken a step further than people who keep trying to conform to 'normality'.

And that is exactly why people often feel uncomfortable around those who do not repress themselves anymore according to the laws of the world. They are not normal, they are not to be trusted, they are to be feared and avoided. They must be locked away. Not to say that they should not be put in prison -although in a more open and connected society they could probably be monitored without a centralized facility-, but maybe we can start thinking of prison in a positive rather than a negative way. Maybe we can start to think of it as a place to come at rest with yourself, to think things over, to stimulate further growth of the individual. This will also remove that quality of coolness of everything that is against the law, which is almost programmed into us from childhood. The prison of the modern society could become like a retreat in the mountains for those who need it. A place to be cut off from worldly pleasures, a place to find peace, to discover the higher enjoyments of existence, and to meet friendly little robots. These robots can in the end become like Zen teachers; quiet, wise, friendly, simply doing what they do, and knowing their Kung Fu when they need it.

The current state of the cyborg

This is an excellent mini-documentary to give you an idea of the current possibilities in bionic enhancement of the human body. It features prosthetic eyes, arms, legs, even fins, all for the celebration of the release of the new Deus Ex game "Human Revolution," and transhumanism in general.

We are indeed entering an era where modifying our own body is becoming more accessible and acceptable. To think that we're all going to have prosthetic body parts is an exaggeration though. That could be based on the idea that technology will somehow 'save' or improve us, or just on an attachment to new technologies. Of course for people who lost a capability of their natural body such technologies are wonderful, plus they open up new exciting and interesting niches for embodied human explorations and operations. But all in all, if we are to physically alter our bodies for the sake of transgressive exploration -not unlike many people are currently doing through plastic surgery, we should as well try to become more deeply connected to that body. We might be able to get beyond seeing it mostly as a physical thing, and discover an energy, an underlying intelligence. Technological modifications like shown in the movie might be very interesting and promising, but they may also tend to blind us from a deeper connection with our own embodiment.

Robot ballcatcher

Here's your chance to see a robotic expert ballcatcher in action. It's made possible by the German fellows at DLR, who have done some sophisticated programming that has the robot determine and continually update a predicted path of the ball. It can then position its hand towards it in order to bring about a smooth catch. The robot can even do this with two balls thrown simultaneously, so it definitely outranks any virtual character in catching qualities, even the Frisbee catching dog in Wii Sports Resort. Imagine the children of the future throwing balls over with inexhaustible robots, or a robotic fridge throwing you a full can of juice and receiving the empty one from a distance, or vending machines that you can just throw money instead of having to fumble and tumble to get that coin or card into the slot. The commercial opportunities of giving technology these basic motor skills are quite endless.

It's a little bit of a pity that this level of artificial intelligence still requires the robot to be hooked up to external processors, but at least we're getting nearer at unraveling and emulating the human embodiment.

Robot beggar

"Please pay me, so I can replicate!"

In addition to the slave, the caretaker, the friend, the guru, and the entertainer, a new social role for the robot has emerged: the beggar. Now you don't have to make people empathize through showing your own suffering, but you simply put an adorable robot there to work people's cuteness-sensing neurons, and do the work for you. Then again, you probably would be better off by just selling that thing.

Bionic bird

You can't say that the people at Festo are very creative, but their creations are nevertheless astonishing for the technical accomplishment and techno-spiritual, light feel to their work. Here it is for the first time that we see an artificial bird that at first glance is pretty much indistinguishable from a real flying bird. Festo has accomplished this through an extremely efficient motion of the wings, that can rotate at different angles.

Be ready for a future in which we make our own animals.

Cartoons go AR with Helicopter Taxi for iPhone

Besides the fresh feel-good boost, the trailer of this iPhone app also gives you a peek into what could grow into the interactive children's cartoon of the future:

Blinky, the bad robot

Combine HAL with R2D2 and you'd get something like Blinky, the star in the fantastic short film 'Bad Robot' by Ruairi Robinson. A must see for everybody on this planet, the film touches upon the soon-to-be unavoidable issue of machine morality, by showing how the behavior of a domestic robot takes an unexpected turn.

Sure we can just treat it as harmless entertainment, a purely fictional film for us to viscerally enjoy. But the more interesting and complete way is to reflect a little bit. So what can we learn here?

- Robots need social intelligence to be able to infer true intentions from people as opposed to irrational utterings that people do without any reflective connection. Probably sensing how calm people are will help robots do this. Another interesting ability for robots would be to detect whether or not somebody is in a state of close-mindedness or open-mindedness. For example, when a robot is constantly smiling, it will probably evoke negativity from a person in a close-minded state, but it can make a person in an open-minded mindstate turn more positive and search for inner ways towards happiness again. The detection of this mindstate is a form of emotional anticipation that can help the robot be a successful social actor.

- Many people will see robots as tools, and not as 'others' or 'equals', and treat them accordingly. They can often be judgemental, irritable, and full of expectations towards them, almost treating them as the ultimate promise of happiness. People who have that meme in their unconscious will, as the Dutch say, 'come home from a cold funfair'. It will take a while before people learn to see robots as they are, and develop a sense of true empathy and unconditional love for them.

- For robots, I believe that to a large extent true empathy and love can be programmed in the end. What is needed is a detailed understanding of the mechanics of consciousness, which will borrow from phenomenological data of human experiences, and will have to do with concepts from quantum physics, such as treating perceptional patterns as vibrations in order to understand them not as patterns of matter, but patterns of mind, that can give rise to ideas like matter. But let me not expand on this now. Basically robots will need to develop their social role from 'dumb servant' to 'loving and understanding father', and do this through learning about mindstates of people and what certain reactions will do to those mindstates.

If you have any reflections or comments, please leave them here so we can have some shared discussion into this fascinating topic. And maybe build that enlightened robot one day.

Incredibly lifelike android

Danish scientist Henrik Scharfe has created a slightly more youthful looking replica of himself in the form of a robot. And not too surprisingly, he has done this in collaboration with Hiroshi Ishiguro, the man who has also created his robot copy, as well as the recent human-looking Elfoid phone system.

The innovation behind this project is mostly in how enormously realistic the face is starting to look. In terms of behavior there is not much going on, as the robot is simply coupled to a human person that directly controls the robot. But maybe soon we will see collaborative projects of companies who work on different parts to create a more complete humanoid robot.



It is definitely a step towards a posthuman existence once we include machines into our concept of a social person. If robots become so real that we mistake them for human beings during an interaction, up to the point that we don't even find out that it was a robot we were interacting with, we cannot fool ourselves anymore and deny that there is a fundamental difference between man and machine, can we?

A question this fundamental is not (yet) the aim of the researchers though. For now they are interested mostly in creating technologies for telepresence that lie in between a purely digital and a purely realistic representation. Furthermore, they are also interested in the emotional interactions that may take place from human to robot, as well as cultural differences in how these robots are perceived.

Here are some images to show you what a day in the life of a robot developer may look like:

Humanoid mobile phone

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro has recently unveiled his latest project, an ultra-anthropomorphized mobile phone named 'Elfoid'. The concept is to have a mobile phone look more like the human being that it connects you to. Instead of just being a 'black-box'-intermediary, now the form of the device starts to take on meaning during a conversation. Whereas now the phone has no behavior yet, researchers are intending to add robotic technologies so the device can physically represent the head movements and facial expressions of the person at the other end of the line. For conversations at home, the researchers have developed a larger humanoid device that does have some motion capability.

Ishiguro's work is known to be shocking, as he is also known for developing a robotic version of himself that eerily enough is quite an accurate replica. And so with these prototypes, we can ask ourselves why they look the way they do. In terms of anthropomorphization, as a designer you can approach the task to go abstract and create an iconic looking product. An approach at the other extreme is to head towards full realism, and make the device look very human in all ways. A third approach is to design the product like a character. This would allow you to suffuse the design with an identity of its own, for example to reflect certain brand values. For this project, the designers have chosen neither of these three approaches, and stayed somewhere in the middle.

The form feels very unfamiliar, alien, and can easily be found creepy. In some way it looks human, but it reminds us of our mortality, our imperfection, our fragility. So why do the Japanese come up with these things, and not give it some kind of a friendly shape? Maybe their answer would be: honesty. Not giving the design an appearance of something it is not. Honesty is one of the requirements for 'good design' in the view of the epic designer Dieter Rams, but it is not easy a principle to understand and apply. In the case of Elfoid, I think the designers are more connected, consciously or unconsciously, to the notion that we are recreating ourselves. We are not creating representations of ourselves, but actual social actors that in the end we can't, and in most cases don't have to, distinguish anymore from 'real' human beings. Self-transcendence is perhaps more deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche, which shows through their technology.

From this light, I think the design approach is a correct one, mainly because it stays true to what the technology does. The idea is that the product is a blueprint of a social actor, that can morph according to who gets channeled, so that the receiver with his imagination can easily construct the mental image of the person he is talking to. In this, the technology is making things more transparent in that it will cost less effort for our minds to have a rich social interaction.

Also the limblessness of Elfoid is only honest. It has no movement capabilities yet, so any reasons to add arms or legs could only be superficial. The kind of honest design so courageously employed by the designers here supersedes the notion that the form on its own looks creepy. We simply will need to face what technology is doing to us as social beings. We can try to deny that it's radical and also a bit scary what is happening in techno-land, and cover it up with feel-good aesthetics, but maybe it would be better if we became more aware of it early on, and have the aesthetics better match the actual developments.

After the colon there is a video showing the home-based humanoid at work:

3D printed portraits

Perhaps after the time in which we all experience our media in three virtual dimensions, the era comes where the entire physical world will also be part of the mediasphere. This little installation here, presented at the TEI conference, might be an early precursor of this technology. It at least shows how interesting it is when things become open-source and we can combine whatever technology we like with whatever other technology, to create things like this 3D portrait printer.



Now in being critical you might take the environmentalist position and say that such developments unnecessarily waste material. But then also ponder what 'necessity' really means. When we reach a level of physical stability and safety, we naturally start needing social recognition, and technologies can greatly help people in developing a social self. It is through our technologies that we get mirrored, and with this feedback we can grow. Seen from this perspective, materials can become magnificent aids in the process of emotional development.

Avant-garde car concepts for Opel Vauxhall

Opel has recently launched a competition in order to explore a design strategy based on the idea of the car becoming a lounge. Keeping in mind the slogan ´Sculptural artistry meets German precision´, design students from all over the world set off to the forefront of automotive design to create their dream car. The results are fascinatingly diverse, in some cases radically advanced in terms of technology, in other cases in terms of form language.

Here are some of the top entries.



Victor Uribe envisioned a car that goes wild on technology integration, while still creating an integral design that fits the idea of a car as a lounge space perfectly. The car consists of a flowing form that floats above its spherical wheels using magnetic levitation technology. Next to that it has all kinds of intelligent features such as sensors, projectors, even a Kinect driving interaction possibility, that sometimes feel a little superfluous, and in some cases plain dangerous. Perhaps the strongest feature of this design is the interior that allows one person to be a seated driver, while two passengers can lay down flat on intelligent, shape-changing lounge surfaces.



Javier Albizu entered the contest with a concept that is based on a deformable exterior. It can for example open and close the air intake on the front in order to either cool its electric motors, or improve its aerodynamic properties. The smooth hull of the car is made of a high-tech skin-like material that incorporates solar energy collectors, graphene to conduct electricity, and magnets to change its shape. The deformation that occurs is a stretching and contracting of the hull over its entire length, quite analogous to the car being one large muscle. This property changes the length of the car, and can be convenient in switching from a city-cruise to the hasty highway.



A girl named Lina takes on the challenge in a very different, very feminine way. She brings the fresh breeze that I feel is so needed in the still largely technology-oriented, male-dominated industrial design industry. Through intuitive and free-flowing sketches Lina has reached a very promising start for a car of the future. Her aesthetics clearly have evolved through her process, which she has suffused with peace, calmth, and feeling. And the final result is very powerful in subconsciously putting us in a similar state of mind.



Pierin Giacomo might have created the most holistic design of the competition in terms of experience and look and feel of both exterior and interior. Stepping into his bio-inspired car must feel like becoming absorbed by a flower. I can see this having a very soothing effect on people.



A last concept to mention is 'Opel Dynamis' by Acatrinei Lucian Nicolae. This very radically futuristic vehicle has some interesting innovations, such as electroactive polymers to adjust seats, 'Buckypaper' as structural reinforcement in the hull, and a flexible LCD display that serves as a dashboard.

Claytronics, for a shape-shifting future

When it comes to vague future visions of technology, I am with CMU's professor Goldstein. He foresees to realize a technology platform that will allow for matter being fully programmable; in real time, and in three dimensions. Their own description sums it up perfectly:

"Claytronics" is an emerging field of engineering concerning reconfigurable nanoscale robots ('claytronic atoms', or catoms) designed to form much larger scale machines or mechanisms. Also known as "programmable matter", the catoms will be sub-millimeter computers that will eventually have the ability to move around, communicate with other computers, change color, and electrostatically connect to other catoms to form different shapes. The forms made up of catoms could morph into nearly any object, even replicas of human beings for virtual meetings.



Of course this is still very rudimentary, and it reminds me of a guy saying that he would be able to create the T-1000, whose proof of concept was a soccer-ball size cube sliding over another cube. A phone changing into a laptop, a physical re-instantiation of another person, and shape-shifting furniture can then become a reality, according the team. Well, nothing is impossible with the right resources and at least now a research group is working on this matter, so keep your antennas tuned.

iPad goes yoga

The people at Joby marketed this nifty iPad support tool through linking it to yoga practice. This flexible support, called the GorillaMobile Yogi, allows for the iPad to be positioned to what matches the user's preferred situation. And so we see the iPad, about the flattest device out there, do a downward dog and a vine pose.

Linking a robot body to a human one with Kinect

I know it's a little nerdiness-heavy and lacking slickness of presentation, but hey, this is the real world, and these early developments towards a world where human and machine live as a brotherhood are just too interesting to not write about at least occasionally.

Enter Taylor Veltrop, who has linked his Kinect to a humanoid robot so he can operate it directly through his own body movements. As he indicates himself, it's nothing but a first rough version towards fluent robot motion control - algorithms such as IK would have to be implemented to give the robot an own mind-connection to its body so that it can make an intelligent conversion of the movements it perceives, instead of blindly following what it sees directly - but it's pretty good already.



The moment when the creator has his robot do push-ups, commenting himself with "Let's do some push-ups", it really seems as if he has created a little version of himself that can now do things through simple control so that the creator does not have to do them anymore within the limits of his own embodiment in the physical world. Whereas this does open up great possibilities, and I do think that in making technology more active we are stimulated in becoming so as well, we on the other hand are reminded again of a future scenario where we have forgotten about the mental and physical development of our own bodies and become the jolly onlookers to a seemingly active world - akin to the media consumers depicted in Pixar's Wall-E. So let's all stay aware.