air doodles

This may be the best virtual reality innovation since "air guitar": It's the sketch furniture by Front. Using motion capture video, pen strokes in the air become CAD 3D digital lines... and they could be used to generate a "rapid prototype" of your air-doodles. (via) I know it's not the same as the virtual graffiti, but in a way it is, only that at the end, you have solid prototypes of your "air-sketch/doodle". The possibilities for this are amazing... imagine making raw sketches for simulation purposes... or maybe on a smaller scale it could be like a wacom drawing tablet but 3D! You could re-size your sketch on the CAD program and get larger or smaller prototypes of your sketch...

The Swedish design group FRONT have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined.



Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture. See the movie of the process of making a sketch into a piece of furniture in just one pen stroke. During Tokyo Design week they showed the process of making Sketch Furniture and the final pieces of furniture at Tokyo Wonder Site. www.tokyo-ws.org Click here to see the movie

Motion Capture is a technique that translates motions into 3D-files. Motion capture is mostly used for animations in movies and computer games. Front have used the technique to simply record the tip of a pen when they draw pieces of furniture in the air. Rapid Prototyping is a technique that materialises 3D-files. A laser beam builds the 3D-file layer by layer within a liquid plastic material. Every 0.1mm the liquid harden by a laser beam. After a few hours, the 3D-files come out as materialised pieces.

ciao