Sketch Your Furniture in the Air

justelite writes "Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialize free hand sketches."

Re:Other uses

[Reziac]

Hmm... you could probably generate some fairly interesting pseudo-classical sculpture that way.

Man, does that ever open a can of copyright worms... Methinks you'd have to be careful to start with a photograph you own the rights to, or that you've already licensed "derivative works" rights to.

On the right track

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest thing hindering the development of a "Santa Claus machine" http://www.tinaja.com/santa01.html [tinaja.com] imho is design. The biggest problem with the design side of things is user interface.

If I were talking to a custom furniture maker I would be gesticulating. This device plus a holograph might provide an awesome way to design furniture. eg. I want it this high. Like this? No, a little lower. Like this? Can we slope the armrest down a bit here? Like this? etc. etc.

The other problem is that most rapid prototyping machines work with only one material and most of the things we use are made of several materials. That's another problem though. I still see the user interface as being the hardest problem.

What kind of machine?

[anagama]

I want to know what the machine is from which the chair seems to rise from a pool of white goo. That's amazing -- what is it called? How much do they cost?

Head set display?

[Benson884]

Sorry if this has been said, but couldn't the designers head position also be tracked by the cameras so a view from their prospective could be fed back to a heads up display? This would allow for a real time overlay of what was being designed to be seen on top of the real space. Could be much more useful, almost like making a sculpture. This would be similar to a technique used in LOTR to shoot using a hand held camera in a virtual environment.