jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2012

Some Kinetics structures

Kinetic Creatures

Herd your own laser-cut cardboard mechanical menagerie

Using the same tab-and-slot construction technique as classic balsa wood airplanes, Kinetic Creatures start as flat-packed, laser-cut cardboard and transform into the impressive mechanical Rory the Rhino, Geno the Giraffe or Elly the Elephant. The DIY animals were conceived by Portland, Oregon-based visual arts teacher Alyssa Hamel and industrial designer Lucas Ainsworth, who were interested in encouraging youth to "be builders, thinkers and inventors". After four years of research and design, the duo are launching a Kickstarter campaign today with the goal of raising enough funds to make the project possible while keeping the production local and sustainable.

As a project with educational roots, Kinetic Creatures require hand assembly and move by either a hand-cranked wire handle or an optional electric gear kit. The intuitively-assembled kit consists of little more than laser-cut wooden gears and a battery-operated on/off switch that fits in the open back of each animal, showing off all the moving parts for a basic lesson in mechanics.

To learn more about the project or to support this clever blend of art and science head to the Kinetic Creatures' Kickstarter. At this point donations are the only route to getting your own animal, so for $30 you can score your own Elly the Elephant or Rory the Rhino, while $40 buys Geno the Giraffe and $90 or more gets you all three critters for your own moving menagerie.

Sculpting Sound

The Swiss artist Zimoun is exhibiting his organic sound installations in a solo show in Florida’s Ringling Museum of Art. The mechanical devices which create soundscapes are presented in a series of repetitive models.

Zimoun blends elements of sound, sculpture, mechanics, and engineering into these sensory experiences which challenge the more typical views of sculpture and sonar performance. The mechanised, structural works are installed in an industrial-like warehouse space that juxtaposes the ‘organic’ sound models with the physical ‘artificial’ environment of its setting.

Zimoun creates the sound sculptures from simple components and basic mechanics, such as mini motors, ping pong balls, cardboard boxes and wires. He explores the physical representation of sound by forming multiples of repeated mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns. This will be the first showing of Zimoun’s work in Florida and one of the few showings of his work in the United States.

kinetic sculpture

Here I created a kinetic sculpture. It’s basically a tetrahedron which is able to transform itself into an other tetrahedron by transforming its vertexes into sides and its sides into vertexes.

This transformation has a midle state which is about a cube. The new vertexes grow from the very center of the sides so it creates a random movements on the floor. As the new vertexis are growing they elevates the object but its balance is unstable so it is going to tilt in a random direction.

The sculpture moved by flexinol wires – because of its low weight and because it doesn’t alter the view.During the project we created a modell vith two servos. It s not so nice as it was with flexinol wires, but we could check the movement.
Inside the object I wanted to place a lightsource which can redefine the space by its slowly moving shadows and can work as a moodlight. The light inside the object can modify the space around us.

domingo, 18 de noviembre de 2012

Foldable, Deployable and Expandable Structures

3D Printers, Amazing!!!!!!

3D-printed buckliball opens new class of collapsible 3D structures

A Hoberman sphere is a structure invented by Chuck Hoberman that resembles a geodesic dome, but is capable of folding down to a fraction of its normal size by the scissor-like action of its joints.

Inspired by the Hoberman Twist-O, a group of engineers at MIT and Harvard University created the "buckliball," a 3D-printed hollow and spherical object. Made of soft rubber, the buckliball contains no moving parts but covered with 24 carefully spaced dimples.

When the air in the buckliball is sucked out the spaces between lateral dimples collapse. Actually when the buckliball's thin ligaments buckle, the thicker ligaments move simultaneously - some rotate clockwise, others counterclockwise. When it is closed entirely the buckliball has only about half the size of the original sphere.

The name buckliball comes from its use of buckling and its resemblance to buckyballs, spherical all-carbon molecules whose name was inspired by the geodesic domes created by architect-inventor Buckminster Fuller.

"In civil engineering, buckling is commonly associated with failure that must be avoided. For example, one typically wants to calculate the buckling criterion for columns and apply an additional safety factor, to ensure that a building stands, says Pedro Reis, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at MIT. "We are trying to change this paradigm by turning failure into functionality in soft mechanical structures. For us, the buckliball is the first such object, but there will be many others."

The buckliball is the first morphable structure can be used in engineering design. The awesome part of this design is that the sphere is fully reversible and can revert back to its original exploded state without a degradation in structural integrity. It is possible to use the buckliball for a widespread applications, such as to design large buildings with collapsible roofs or walls, or to make tiny drug-delivery capsules, not to mention many applications to design a new kind of Transformer toy.

Our nature has already used a similar design. Viruses inject their nucleic acids into a host through a reversible structural transformation in which 60 holes open or close based on changes in the acidity of the cell's environment, a different mechanism that achieves a similar reversible collapse at the nanoscale.

"The buckliball not only opens avenues for the design of foldable structures over a wide range of length scales, but may also be used as a building block for creating new materials with unusual properties, capable of dramatic contraction in all directions," says Katia Bertoldi, an assistant professor in applied mechanics at Harvard.

Absolutely stunning cocoon lamp created with multi-material 3D printer

This stunning Cocoon Lamp is inspired by Neri Oxman's "the beast", cocoon is also from the nature - a cocoon is a shell which protects the insect for their metamorphosis. It is created by Patric Günther at the Voxel Studio and 3d printed by Objet Technologies.

With the polyjet technologies from Objet Connex multi-material 3D printer, it is possible to print the Cocoon Lamp with more than just one material.

The Cocoon Lamp consists of 3 materials:

1. The white and hard material "VeroWhite" is used for inner element of the lamp providing rigidity and disseminates and light can be reflected through its surface.

2. TangoBlackPlus is a flexible, rubber-like dark layer that is used for the surfaces of the side of the lamellae, this is for providing the desired color contrast and surface protection.

3. The cocoon is connected to the mounting element through a fitting at its lower end. This special fitting is printed out of "DigitalMaterial" which is the mixture of "VeroWhite" and "TangoBlackPlus" materials made from the PolyJet matrix technology. The result is mixed color - grey and mixed features - not stiff but also not completely flexible.

10 super beautiful 3D printed mathematical sculptures of Henry Segerman

Math, fashion, art, 3D printing, Henry Segerman, do they have connections? yes, mathematician and a mathematical artist Henry Segerman at the University of Melbourne, Australia created these beautiful Mathematical sculptures using 3D printing technology.

Most of the sculptures are made using 3D printing material nylon 12, or PA2200 Selective-Laser-Sintered, which is "White, Strong & Flexible" - it is a strong nylon material and has a good heat resistance. Segerman designed his work in Rhinoceros, a NURBS based modelling tool and produced the sculptures by Shapeways. 3D printing technology make it possible to produce his scupltures very close to mathematically precise geometry.

1. Fractal Graph 3

henry_segerman_math_3D_printed_structure

(Left: A view from 'outside the corner'. Right: Reverse view)

Size: 10.6 w x 10.6 d x 10.6 h

"This is a graph embedded in 3-dimensional space as a subset of the cubic lattice. The graph has a fractal structure, formed by a process of repeated substitution."

2. Hopf Fibration

henry_segerman_math_3d_printed_sculpture

A 2-fold symmetry axis. Size: 7.8 w x 7.8 d x 3.4 h cm

"Rectangular tube version. One arc's worth of fibers, from pole to pole."

3. Round Klein Bottle

Size: 15.2 w x 15.2 d x 10.9 h cm

"A Klein bottle in 3-dimensional space has to intersect itself, and in this case it intersects itself along a straight line."

4. Torus Autologlyph

Size: 3.5 w x 10.1 d x 10.1 h cm. "A self-referential tessellation of the torus."

5. Knotted Cog

henry_segerman_knotted_cog_3d_printed_sculpture

Size: 1.3 w x 3.4 d x 3.8 h cm. "This steampunk style knotted cog was procedurally generated using 3-dimensional spherical geometry, then stereographically projected into our (mostly) Euclidean universe."

This is made from stainless steel infused with bronze.

6. 24-cell

7. Half of a 120-Cell

8. Juggling Club Motion

"This shows (a somewhat idealised version of) the path of a juggling club as it is thrown from the right hand to the left, making a single spin."

9. Archimedean Spire

10. The famous Hilbert Curve: size 4.4 w x 4.4 d x 4.4 h cm

The Hilbert Curve is probably the most practical object from Segerman. It can be used as a bracelet or hair accessory.

henry_segman_knotted_cog_3d_printed_sculpture

Designing and 3D printing a synchro gearbox

3D printing technology helps A. Papadopoulos prove-out his design and it provides a prototype for showing his project. GrabCAD user A. Papadopoulos created a 3d printed synchro gearbox and uploaded online. It is a project made for Technological Educational Institute of Crete. He designed Synchro Gearbox using Skeleton Modeling software and excel, and finally 3D printed with Dimension elite 3D printer. Totally 142 pieces parts are printed out. What a fabulous piece! Do you also like it? A. Papadopoulos shares the stl file at http://grabcad.com/library/3d-printed-synchro-gearbox for everyone to download and print their own gearbox.

sábado, 17 de noviembre de 2012

Random TechInformation

Kinetic colour sound

Whitney Music Box – Coverpop (jbum)

It seems as if a revolution of sound-image based synaesthesia is now truly underway. From software based approaches using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis of music and sound to drive visuals (VVVV & Proce55ing) to the manual synchronisation of the musical beat and the video frame in Vj’ing and experimental film.

Early Pioneers of experimental film and animation where just as interested in the symbiosis of tone and hue. The widely appreciated work of Oskar Fischinger is known particularly for its synchronisation of sound and image. Around 1950 Fischinger devised his ‘colour organ’ named the Lumigraph a machine played both sounds and lights and serving as an instrument for one-man shows.

Another pioneer interested in the relationship between image and sound is John Whitney. In his is classic work, Digital Harmony – On The Complementarity of Music and Visual Art, Whitney explores what he calls ‘harmonic resonance’ in animation, where different parts of an animation are given different fixed parameters (of say speed and/or direction) to produce subtle patterns. He referenced this further to musical harmony and laid down the groundwork for some specific methods for producing what he called ‘visual music’.

Coverpop’s ‘Whitney Music Box’ is a successful attempt at realising Whitney’s ideas. Coloured dots revolve in circles a periodically, and like a music box, when each dot reaches a specific point it’s associated note is sounded resulting in a kaleidoscopic composition composed entirely by numbers.

Tangible Textural Interface

http://vimeo.com/44646607 (video)***********

The technology isn't necessarily as avant-garde as Makey Makey, AnyTouch, or Sketch Synth, but Eunhee Jo's Tangible Textural Interfacesound system is a nice concept in a very nice package.

Jo says, "My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment. As you control the functions [backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser], the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music."

Kinetic Rain

Claiming to be the world's largest kinetic art installation, a new sculpture by German design studio Art + Com has recently been installed in Signapore's Changi International Airport.

Called 'Kinetic Rain', the sculpture consists of 1,216 individual raindrops cast in bronze, connected by fine wires and individually controlled by motors. The raindrops are computer programmed to transform into multiple shapes and switch between undulating gently and accelerating rapidly akin to an almighty rainstorm.

It's the best looking rain we've seen in a while (and in London, we've seen alot). Check out the video above for yourself.

This Gizmo Lets You Draw A UI On Paper, Then Turns It Into A Touch Screen

You know those huge multichannel mixers--the massive boards that audio engineers manage during concerts to control everything from sound to lights? It’s the sort of highly specialized hardware that the average person would never come into contact with, because why would they? But what if you could just draw it?

That’s the idea behind the SketchSynth, by Carnegie Mellon student Billy Keyes. It allows you to draw your own specialized piece of sound hardware--in this case, a MIDI board--on any random piece of paper.

“Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by control panels,” Keyes explains on his blog. “In elementary school, my neighbor and I would spend our bus rides pretending to operate incredible imaginary machines with cardboard controllers we drew, cut, and taped the night before. Even now, I pause when I see desks covered in gauges, switches, knobs, and buttons, wondering what they all do.”

His approach is a compromise between boundless childhood imagination and human factors of practicality: He designed three distinct controls that anyone could draw. So users create buttons by drawing circles, toggles by drawing rectangles, and sliders by drawing an elongated I.

A simple webcam picks up the shapes and sends them to a computer, then, a projector actually lays extra data on top of the drawing, like virtual nubs to control the sliders. This approach allows the user to draw something simple and stagnant, while light can animate additional content wherever it may be needed. The camera is able to track the user’s hands on the controls, not through fancy IR-based 3-D models, but just by sensing the color green in human skin.

A Vertiginous Mirrored Room That Multiplies Inhabitants Infinitely

On the outside, the mirrored walls of this unadorned rectangular box help it blend into the space it occupies--a gallery at KUNSTEN, Museum of Modern Art, in Aalborg, Denmark, where it was installed last year. On the inside--well, that’s a different story.

When visitors enter the nearly hundred-square-foot room--an installation dubbed "The Phoenix Is Closer Than It Appears," by Berlin-based artistThilo Frank--the mirrored walls have the opposite effect. Where on the outside, they diverted your visual attention, on the inside, they direct it--very, very intensely. The occupier of Frank’s room sees himself multiplied infinitely on the walls, floor, and ceiling--like a carnival hall of mirrors with a more rigorous geometry. The piece recalls earlier works that experimented with immersive, mirrored experiences, like Lucas Samaras’s Room No. 2, from 1966. But what makes Frank’s slightly different is the unexpected form of seating it offers inside.

Instead of a chair or a bench, visitors are encouraged to park themselves on a simple plank swing, suspended from the room’s ceiling, which introduces a dizzying element of motion to their battery of illusory selves. The text accompanying the installation probably isn’t overstating the experience: "Once [the visitor] begins to swing," it reads, "the disorientation is at full effect: walls, ceiling and floor disappear in a spatial centrifugal motion, which seems to suck the body in and out of the infinite space."

The Density of Light sees super-chromatic artist Gabriel Dawe make rainbows real

Gabriel Dawe’s latest Plexus site-specific installation sees the artist accumulate thousands of strands of sewing threads, solidifying space in a vibrant, tangible spectrum of colour. The absolute precision of its making allows the viewer to perceive it from all manner of angles with the effect being somewhere between “material and the immaterial.”

Through the materials he uses, the artist returns to his childhood frustration at his Mexican heritage, the threads, and more specifically embroidery, symbolising the purported machismo mentality, the cultural roles of the genders, and a “complicated network between ideas and people.” The overall effect is both sculpturally architectural and very, very beautiful.

Cushion Control

WITH DIDIER HILHORST FOR DROOG DESIGN · A new generation of remote controls: a bunch of different cushions each having its own function: one for the channels, one for the power, one for the volume and so on. These remote controls can be thrown around, transforming the fights over “who has the remote” into playful cushion fights.

Chandelier by Troika

Chandelier by Troika. Large fresnel lenses shape light from LEDs suspended below into overlapping geometric patterns on the ceiling of the Royal Society of Arts‘ headquarters in London.

Piccolo

When we imagine robots we still have an image of a quasi C3PO bot clunking around space stations in an alarmingly human manner. Unfortunately we’re not quite there yet, but we do seem to be on the right path.

Say hello to Piccolo, a pocket-sized drawing CNC bot which can not only sketch, doodle and graffiti its way around a piece of paper, but also has a depth engine that means it can draw just as succinctly on 3D objects. For just $70, the Piccolo, designed by tech studio Diatom, arrives in an easy-to-assemble kit and, while it can only create very small images (it is a very smallbot after all), it uses sensory data to aid it with its drawings. It’s even capable of fabricating tiny forests based on light levels. It's also an open-source project, meaning it will gradually improve as more people tinker away with it.

While the product may only initially be picked up by bot enthusiasts, hobbyists and the programmers, the technology could have greater capabilities once people play around with the open-source platform. And with its sensory capabilities, who knows what the Piccolo will be drawing in the future!

Soundmachines [Arduino, Processing, Objects]

creative applications site while researching into new arduino based workshops and ideas, so simple but genius.

The Product, a Berlin-based design studio with a focus on objects, space and interaction, was commissioned by Volkswagen to develop a set of visuals for an interactive musical performance for the premiere of the New Beetle at the 2011 IAA motor show (September 15-25, 2011, Frankfurt am Main). What the client got instead was Soundmachines – a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs. Honk for ingenuity!

The development of the visual turntable trio was nothing short of a process, says Jens Wunderling ofThe Product in an email. “The initial commission called for a set of visuals for a performance entitledConnectivity, that was supposed to allow both the performer and the audience to contribute to the music. To achieve that the client proposed a camera tracking system analyzing motion in the audience. We realized pretty quickly though that the spatial and lighting conditions at the IAA Volkswagen area weren’t suitable for what they wanted us to do.” A different idea for engaging the audience was needed. Something playful and intuitive that young and old could easily interact with. “We had some vague conceptual ideas for visual turntables earlier. We really liked the elegance of the interface and at some point simply proposed to build them.” So they did.