hackaday.com: Do you miss the old days of making things by hand, without the aid of a computer? Do you remember actually drafting drawings by hand? Well, the folks over at the Human-Computer Interaction group from the Hasso Plattner Institute have come up with a rather novel idea, combining manual input via laser pointers, to cut designs with a laser cutter. Sound familiar? A few days ago we shared another cool project on Laser Origami from the same people.
15 comments:
This is a cool bit of interactive technology and it could really help some designers translate their ideas to cut items easier. I wonder how the computer extrapolates intent and how free form you can be. This seems like it could grow into something that could be useful but at the moment I think that it is not radically changing the human computer interaction equation. It is really just a slow way of turning a sketch into paper pieces. The precision of CAD and the current laser cutters is such that it leaves little to be desired and with a tablet you can have the same interactivity with a CAD program that you have with this laser cutter. This is cool but not a game changer.
Very cool! cool new way of thinking about laser cutting, something which is assumed to be a computer input to machine output process, this adds a human element to it. While its cool, it doesn't seem that useful, it seems like the extent of creative creation is limited by what you can program the laser to understand, because at least the way think about it, laser cutters are used to cut things that would be impractical to cut out by hand. It seems a but like building a pedal powered SUV.
A bit*
I want this. This would make model building so much easier! I do have some questions about it though. everything that was shown in the video was either a circle or had right angles. I wonder what the table would do if a diagonal line was necessary for the design. I also wonder how the scale works. I agree with Luke that this doesn't seem to be a "game changer" but I think it's a good step forward. I'd really love the opportunity to play around with this.
Its really difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that technology is impossible to catch up with. Everyday new things are being invented before you become comfortable with the things you already own. I think this technology is going to become ground breaking eventually, but for now I still have questions about the product. Its rurally cool that a simple lasar pointer can command a computer to accurately and quickly cut a small piece of wood. This technology is going to explode the world of laser cutting because a variety of skill levels are now all going to be able to quickly render than produce a product. It also seamed that the machine could quickly product a physically product in a timely manner instead of taking 4 hours for a simple task. I love the different pens and how each one can complete different tasks. However, it also looked like you need to use and know how to use 20 pens. There must be a ton of user and machine error from the combination of lasers. This technology is going to become popular very quickly and and become the next standard one day in the world of laser cutting machinery.
This does look like a really cool idea but I also question the usefulness of it. It certainly is cool to be able to "sketch" ideas directly into a material but why would you ever want to do that other than to just play around with it. You could never be as precise as if you were using CAD and if you really want to sketch your ideas you might as well do it on paper and then take that and put it in CAD. I also feel like you would end up wasting a lot of material with mess-ups or things just not coming out with the precision you need. Overall it definitely seems cool but really not that useful.
This seems a little redundant to me. The whole point of a laser cutter is to create model pieces more quickly and accurately than a person can by hand. And it works: you can input exact measurements and such in via a CAD program, and then the laser cutter will cut them out exactly as you have asked. The only people I can see wanting this are those people are firm believers in hand drafting, and those people probably aren't too fond of laser cutters anyways. So although this is very cool, as is any direct interaction between humans and technology (wii, knect, etc.), it does seem redundant.
this is very interesting and could even redefine the definition of laser cutting. From watching the video and how the laser cutter interacted with the actions of the person, it seems that the machine is intuitive in a way that I have never seen before. With all laser cutters that I have used before, the process is very straight forward and once the printer starts cutting, there is no interrupting it. This process of drawing and then cutting and then drawing and cutting again seems so much more design oriented and user friendly. I am excited to see where this technology goes in the future and how laser cutting evolves with the design fields.
I cannot decide whether I am seriously excited by this or if I am not a fan at all. I am a big believer that technology has taken over way too many aspects of our lives and that things need to change if we don't want to loose virtually all human interactions and tech-less experiences. On the one had this is really nifty and seems really helpful in counteracting the "All technology, all the way" concept that seems to taken over by adding a direct human interaction aspect to a previously purely mechanical process. On the other hand however, it raises the concern that if people start to do these little things to add just a but of "humanness" to machines that it will provide just enough comfort to people that they will stop worrying about there being too much technology in our world. It is kind of like how they make digital books have pages that appear to turn; they make it seem real enough so people don't miss actual books.
On one hand this is cool because it allows a laser cutter to be used as more of an art tool. You can be more free with it and design as you go. But this also seems like it severely limits the abilities of a laser cutter. If you give it a pre-drawn file it can be more precise and cut out complex shapes because it can figure out the path it needs to take before hand. Still a cool concept though.
This is very very cool. Of course, it isn't going to revolutionize anything because of the impracticality of drafting straight to cutting materials, if you mess up there is no way to rectify it. However, this could make a neat new way to draft onto a computer, then edit on there, and then send it to the cutter. Or, alternatively, to expose non designers to lasers as a tool for doodling.
Yeah, this is cool. While I’m sure that this and similar technology will become a new vehicle for artists, I’m not sure what practical purpose it could serve for production shops. There’s nothing that this laser can cut that we couldn’t cut with a band saw. And the band saw would be faster, easier, and a lot more precise.
I’m not exactly sure what the intended use for this machine was, other than “hey look what we can do.”
i Found an article on this about a year ago. The concept is very intriguing but Fran has a point that in a production setting this does not seem to have much relevancy but for an artist or even someone prototyping it could be a quick way to fabricate pieces but the lack of accuracy deters me from really seeing a practical use.
This method of design lacks an aspect that, to my mind, is essential to the skill of drawing: feedback. There seems to be a significant delay between the input of stylus to medium and the reproduction of that input, in this case by the laser (a delay the creators of the machine must be aware of given the time-lapse filming technique they employ in this video to make the process look more immediate than it is). One cannot see what one is doing in real time. The tools that are available, polyline, bend, round corner, extrude, are very cool and I'm sure very useful for doing certain types of projects, but are not as freely creative as I would like. Plus there's like a dozen of them. It feels like this technology is close, but not quite there. What we really want is one stylus that can be switched between tasks, that somehow provides some feedback as we draw. Maybe there's a mat on the glass top of the cutter that you actually draw on like an etch-a-sketch so you can see what you're cutting before wasting your material. It's also apparent that this technology dispenses with one of the main things I go to the laser for: precision. If that book binding had to be any particular size, I don't know how close you could really get with this method.
What this does make me want to do is figure out a way to scan a hand sketch to pdf and print that as a vector on the laser cutter. I've done this with engravings, but I never thought of cutting a vector this way. Has anyone done this without having to trace it in CAD and assign a 0.0 lineweight? The immediacy of this method certainly lacks in comparison to the method detailed in this article, but with the proper set up, could produce similar results in similar amounts of time.
This is pretty amazing, but a bit strange.
It feels like how they used to have a funny little red dot in the middle of laptops that was used as a mouse and now they have touch pads.
I feel like some people might be enjoy using the table in a more user friendly way however I don't understand how exact it could be. And isn't it in a way just easier to do it on the computer and upload a file?
At the end of the day, I think this isn't to practical...
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