Tuesday, October 27, 2015
An Upgraded Tape Gun Lets You Quickly Build Life-Size Wireframe Prototypes
gizmodo.com: How many times have you battled a tape measure to try and figure out a if new piece of furniture will actually fit in your living room? With the ProtoPiper—a heavily upgraded tape gun—you can quickly build a full-scale mockup of almost any object and know for sure how big it will be.
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5 comments:
This is so cool!! I want one so badly! The practical uses for this seem a bit fuzzy, but it still seems fun to use. I suppose it could help for visual people who need to see exactly how big something needs to be or can be to fit in a specific space. Although simple measuring could get that done.. At the moment, it seems about as useful as a 3D printer was a couple of years ago. Perhaps it could make beautiful artwork. I would love to see a room completely made out of that, that would be visually very interesting, but other than that, it does not scream useful to me. Another thing is what happens when you're done with it? Do you crumble it up into a little tape ball and trash it? does it leave residue? It actually seems less helpful than a 3D printer, because at least with a 3D printer, you ended up with a little plastic trinket, but with this you have a ball of tape at the end. This could possibly have some better use in the future, for engineers or designers who find it easier to sketch objects in the actual 3D plane than the one in Acad or other software. Right now, though, it's really cool, but really useless...
I want one. I have no idea what I’d do with one personally, but as a tool in theater, I think there are a number of uses. This is a pretty ingenious product. It basically takes the idea of a 3D printing pen and amps is up. For home use, I’m not quite sure what I would do with this. It could be useful to make mock-ups of furniture when moving or buying new furniture. But, for most homeowners that wouldn’t happen very often. I know my parents haven’t moved in 30 years and gotten new furniture in at least ten. I can see this being an excellent tool for stage managers when taping out items on a rehearsal floor isn’t possible. Sometimes rehearsal halls have to be used for multiple shows at a time. Or, more practically, for wagons and other scenery that moves around onstage. You can create a footprint of the item and move it around on the rehearsal floor just as it would on stage.
This is very cool. I wish the article said more about how it worked: as a tool to build prototype furniture, it looks great but I do wonder how much time and effort the user has to put in making sure that each piece is the right size, is attached in the right place, etc. I think their selling point as a time saver is a little bit off...but all the same, it certainly looks like fun! As a cheap way to prototype something, it might be more useful. I wonder how strong the material actually is, and how expensive the tape rolls are. I think it would be a great way to create some fun containers for a home, or to make a decoration, or a holder for something. Weird kitchen rack, boxes to keep things on shelves, under-bed storage, shoe-racks, etc. All of this is potentially possible, depending on the strength of the material that is used. Overall a very cool device that I think with some more development could be very useful.
The ProtoPiper seems like a pretty fun toy to play around with, but I don't really see any real value in what you can use it for. Sure the developers say you can use it to create large scale wire-frame mock ups of items, which there is value in, but in terms of consistent use this modified tape gun doesn't have any real applications. Sure you could mock-up that sofa you want to see might fit between your lamp and bookcase, but instead of wasting time building a tape model you could just use a measuring tape or do a quick top view diagram of the room and draw it in to see if it will fit. Sure it's nice to be able to have a life size model, but is it worth it to buy this gadget to do that when you could save both time and money just conceptualizing it and then moving forward? at the end of the day you have to ask yourself, "is it really worth my time to stop what I'm doing and build a giant tape frame?" (As cool as that is).
This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. This idea of making a steel tube out of tape is pure genius. I love these kinds of projects. Too be able to automate a tape dispenser and have it coil into a perfect cylinder is fantastic.. The heat wire that cuts the tape into various fastener options is another detail that makes this gun so advanced. I don’t think there is a market for a toy like this yet but I would love to have one on the bookshelf in my house. It reminds me of something out of a video game. Anyone that is in a field with an element of design should always do some form of prototyping. Being able to do it full size and in a short amount of time is useful. I’m curious to see what these designers will create with their new toy.
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