Prototyping Your Product: You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

Do we live in an age in which we can draw with a pen, in thin air, an object we would like to create, and have the data captured by a machine and churned out in the form of a 3D prototype?  Or, perhaps we can take a 3D prototype, and just by touching, squeezing, pushing, and pulling on it, we could manipulate and mold the object into the dimensions we want to get a look at, and then change them to something else in seconds?  I am not on drugs.  These possibilities for Rapid Prototyping and Claytronics are beginning to become a reality, as the growth of new technologies is allowing for entirely new ways of creating and interacting with the 3D world.

Take a look at the sketch furniture of Front Design, a design group from Sweden.  They have devised a method of materializing free hand sketches in air by combining two technologies: motion capture and rapid prototyping.  Thus, what one draws in thin air comes out of a rapid prototyping machine hours later as a hard object.  What’s that?  Aunt Mildred will be coming to dinner tomorrow night as well and we need an extra chair?  Ok…let me draw one.  Ikea…watch out. 

Want to take this a step further?  Welcome Claytronics, a synthetic reality project undertaken at Carnegie Mellon University:

The goal of the claytronics project is to
understand and develop the hardware and software neccesary to create a
material which can be programmed to form dynamic three dimensional
shapes which can interact in the physical world and visually take on
an arbitrary appearance.  Claytronics refers to an ensemble of
individual components, called catoms—for claytronic
atoms—that can move in three dimensions (in relation to other catoms),
adhere to other catoms to maintain a 3D shape, and compute state
information (with possible assistance from other catoms in the
ensemble).  Each catom contains a CPU, an energy store, a network
device, a video output device, one or more sensors, a means of
locomotion, and a mechanism for adhering to other catoms.

Front Design’s methods, while currently possible, are not necessarily available to those who don’t have a motion sensor pen and rapid prototyping machine in the garage.  Looks like Ikea is safe for now.  Claytronics, and its various applications, are still a ways out from general use.  Researchers on the project have made noteworthy progress and are confident they will be able to manufacture their clay robots, but aren’t quite sure whether it will be 5 or 20 years before they will accomplish what they hope for.  While these technologies are still largely coming down the pipeline, it’s a sign of prototyping and so much more to come.  The possible applications are endless, but one that jumps right out at me is that companies and designers will be able to move through prototype iterations much more quickly and easily.  The length of time and work involved, for an idea to go from your head to a physical object, will be drastically reduced.