Here’s another thing to add to your holiday wish-list: a liquid-plastic prototyping machine linked to motion capture technology. The Swedish design group FRONT, currently working in Japan, has an impressive site showing them waving their pens in the air sketching furniture, the motion then becomes a 3-D file which is sent to a laser prototyping machine. The laser hardens the liquid plastic into an exact model of the original sketch. The results have a loopy but fascinating quality about them.

For those able to afford the equipment, this technology allows designers to make physical objects from even the most basic drawings, drawings made in pure space. The possibilities of rapid prototyping are basically endless, giving a tremendous degree of freedom to those who have access to the machine. Now, whether consumers would accept a chair designed in thirty seconds of hand-waving is a different story.

Link to FRONT’s Sketch Furniture including the video.

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See Also: Semiotic Sketch-based Interface,Craig’s List meets Deep Space 9: why not!,This Week in Outer Space,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 5:35 am and is filed under Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.