Wired @ Home

Have you ever wanted to create your own furniture? Well I have, especially chairs and this is where a Swedish company comes in. They have created a pen coupled with cameras to sense where you move the pen, track it, and use this information to create the structure you drew in the air. After I saw the creations it turned me off but it was mainly because it was ugly white and the pen draws the lines in a cylinder form. On the other hand the technology was a great demonstration of what kind of technology we have. My dream machine would convert AutoCad drawings, namely buildings, into a 3-D model which could use the same type of technology. The pen is not commercially available yet so don`start saving those pennies.

Basically what the system does is it converts the sketches into 3D digital files with the root of that information coming from the cameras. These 3D files can be easily used by the machine to then create a protype of your project. There is a laser beam on top of the prototyping machine that molds the plastic 0.1mm at a time. This whole process takes around a day.