FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
INTERNATIONAL HOME + HOUSEWARES SHOW 2013
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2012
BEIJING DESIGN WEEK 2012
In broad strokes, mankind's woodworking abilities have gone from 1) hand tools, to 2) power tools to 3) CNC machinery. And although the power tools step was a quantum leap from hand tools, it still requires you physically touch the material quite a bit, guiding and steadying it while performing your operations; with CNC, you only contact it when you're loading and unloading it into the machine. There is a materials disconnect with CNC, as you're not physically guiding the cuts, and you don't even have to be in the room when it's happening.
Which is why I found this human-computer-interaction concept from Germany's Hasso Plattner Institut so interesting. Called "Interactive Lasercutting," the researchers use a self-rigged lasercutter called the Constructable, and require the user to be present during the cutting. Rather than drawing up a CAD file, converting it into a tool path, loading the machine and taking lunch, the user is meant to stand over the machine and instigate each cut, or series of cuts, by "drawing" on the wood with a laser pointer. The machine then translates your sloppy strokes into precise cuts, something like handwriting recognition turning your chicken scratch into typography. Observe:
Hopefully you're able to disregard the clunky interface—all those styluses represent different types of cuts—and weird editing, and just focus on the concept: Do you think this has merit? For single-object production, could this actually be more efficient than doing the CAD/toolpath dance? I suspect not, but there's something I like about being able to stand over the material and manipulate it in real time.
Thoughts?
See also: A Handheld CNC for 2D Applications
Comments
this is amazing and interactive- and only a matter of time until the military weaponizes this into a delay action death-saber
There is the performance side of art that can be lost by having the fallback of the undo command.
This is an interesting concept that moves the design from the computer, likely in another location, to the plant floor. I have seen some HMI systems that allow you to create fairly complex objects at the machine. The only advantage I see is that you can draw right on the material. You lose absolute precision unless you have some method of inputting those variables. Maybe a combination of HMI and laser pointer.
Using a single laser with a menu located near the material would be a less complicated solution - point the laser at polyline on the menu, then draw out your shape on the material. Point it at rounded corner and then go back to the material to draw your corners. You would be a lot more productive than constantly changing pointers.
Not a bad concept. Especially as an intermediate step between brainstorming and production. As a mechanical engineering student, with a background in hands-on work, CAD frustrates me to no end. I'd much rather spend my time making something real and tactile as opposed to a graphical representation.
I think this particular interface would be clumsy and awkward. With the computer filling in the gaps, I'm sure you'd have a hard time getting what you wanted out of it. However the idea is interesting for some rapid prototyping. If say, you could draw the shapes you want on the wood, and then a computer turns your physical drawings into tool paths or something. It would probably save time over putting it through the CAD regime. You could still have fairly accurate measurements as you could use drawing tools, where you could not with this current concept.
No. Never. It's just an extra layer of terrible interface over CAD. It won't let you do precision drawing, it won't let you see and correct your mistakes, it separates you from both your drawing and the material.
Want to quickly draw a shape? Use a Wacom tablet or a touchscreen - same sketching motions, with greater precision, plus the ability to see what exactly you're drawing and edit before cutting. Want to draw something right upon your piece of wood? Use a pen with UV ink, then put it into you laser cutter combined with a cheap scanner or a camera. Even a simple colored pencil will do, actually, as long as your software can recognize its distinct color while analyzing the scan. But this entire contraption built around laser pointers is so pointless, so anti-ergonomic and so anti-any-meaningful-real-life-usage that it can have one purpose only: to remind us all that there are really bad design ideas too, and you should avoid implementing them in metal.
Seems like an intriguing idea at first glance, but this seems like it would never produce results that were expected, and the video doesn't prove it out in my mind. I don't want to be too cynical, but some of the laser pointer paths were substantially offset from the actual cutting laser paths, so much so that I have reason to suspect this video was 'produced' rather than being purely documentation of the claims. Even if it did work, why create such a digital disconnect when doing such 'manual' work. I simply don't like the idea of cutting using what is essentially a projecting mechanism that doesn't leave a trace of where you've been on the previous portion of your cutting path - too much potential of wasted cutting. 'wr' is onto something better - manually draw on the wood with an ink that could be interpreted by the laser cutter, and you'll know what you get.