Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Origin Story: A Smart Router That Turns Virtually Anyone Into a Maker
Dwell: As the maker movement continues to take root, the personal technologies driving it are not only becoming more sophisticated, but also more practical and attainable. Case in point: Origin, a handheld CNC router that uses augmented reality to act as an “autocorrect for your hands.” From chicken coops to derby cars to drones—projects that have already been completed with Origin—the tool has proven itself to be versatile and intuitive to use. I visited the headquarters of Shaper, the San Francisco startup behind it all, to see it in action.
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2 comments:
From what I can tell, this would be a great little tool for a small scene shop. With this tool, a shop wouldn't need to invest a large amount of funding towards a full-size CNC router, table and associated tools. The Origin can enable small shops to produce complex CNC work by simply having a carpenter follow a pattern with the router using their hands. The inherent portability of this machine means it could be used on the job, as well. If a piece of scenery needed to be touched up (or if the design changed slightly), someone could easily load the change onto the Origin and make the fix onsite, rather than sending the piece back to the shop. This can save both time and money. I think the next step forward is to address a drawback of the Origin: it's constant physical dependence on a user to move it. In the future, I would expect an autonomous version of the Origin - one that uses, for example, rubber treads and suction cups to move itself around the work piece. I don't think such a product is far from production.
From the perspective of a programmer/software engineer who is also passionate about designing and building, I think Origin is a great invention as well as a revolutionary concept. It is like a super user-friendly version of a 3-D printer. In the past few years, I have tried to learn several kinds of developing tools or softwares: Arduino, Django for web dev, Android dev for apps, Processing, etc. And all of them had a long and weird learning curve. Makers and designers are not always the best at using softwares, and programmers who know a ton about softwares usually don't have the talent to design. There is really an urgent need for tools that can compensate for the lack of skills of both these groups, and lower the threshold for making things. I think to an extent Origin is trying to tackle that issue, but it still has a long way to go. First of all, it is super expensive to manufacture. I can envision a future where every middle student has one of these for arts/crafts/science classes at school, but right now it is just too expensive. Secondly, as Sam pointed out, its functionality is limited by its small size. If there could be a larger version of this, it can be used for so many other purposes.
--Joyce
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