The principles behind the design of these quadcopters apply to the design of any product.
The lesson here is that some high performance tasks are easier than others and understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which are hard.
Vittorio Cuculo took an Arduino, an RGB LED, and an IKEA lamp and programmed the system to recognize your facial expression and change the color of the light based on how it thinks you’re feeling. I’ll say that again. How it thinks you’re feeling. Sure, it’s a simple interaction and it may be easy to argue the utility of such a system, but projects like this represent significant steps into the future of our interactions with the physical objects we own even though the steps may appear, at first blush, to be small.
These are a bit heavy on the marketing-speak and not as deep into the details as I like to get, but there are a few interesting bits making these videos worth posting; hardware and software designed in conjunction, optimization of the 3D engine, and insight into the magnitude of physical testing going into design validation.
Episode 1: Concept & Design
Episode 2: Display and 3D Framework
Episode 3: Testing
Episode 4: Manufacturing
Episode 5: Day One (all marketing here, but kinda cool to see all the pieces in action together)
I’d love to see how they make that sheetmetal housing. Hydroforming? Tricky welding?
Inside you’ll find some interesting information on the design process at Marin Bikes and Senz Umbrellas. There are a quite a few nuggets on MCAD software updates and even an article on establishing assembly constraints by yours truly. Have a look and let me know what you think.
Described as an “As-natural-as-possible sketching system for creating 3D curve models,” three students at the University of Toronto have developed the most interesting 3D design interface I have seen in a long time. They call it “I Love Sketch.” One of the things that makes this application so compelling is the way the software behaves just as a designer would expect it to; anticipating things such as intended sketch planes, gesture recognition, auto-generating symmetric curves. They are presenting their paper (pdf) on day 2 of the 2008 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
A 3D curve sketching system that captures some of the affordances of pen and paper for professional designers, allowing them to iterate directly on concept 3D curve models. The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.