The evolution of the architectural medium in engaging digital 3D

A pretty neat thesis from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Greg Tran explains that the traditional mode of material production moves forward, but three new forms of design emerge. Digital 3d immersion is the first and is most similar to virtual reality (but has little to nothing to do with architecture.) It is a simulated environment which is entirely digital and relies on material/site specificity as little as possible. Digital 3d renovation is where existing facilities are retrofit with site specific D3d software and environment recognition, but the final condition is Digital 3d architecture. This bridges the design gap between the digital and the material.

The purpose of his thesis is not to design an architecture that works perfectly within this new medium, but rather to highlight the medium itself, research potentials, create kernel ideas and discover the implications that this type of reality would hold.

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More versions:

Final segment here (2.5 minutes) Mediating Mediums - The Digital 3d (Part 3)
Short version here (5.5 minutes) Mediating Mediums - The Digital 3d (Short Version)
Long version here (19minute version) - Mediating Mediums: The Digital 3d

The Printing Dress: You are what you tweet!

Asta Roseway and Sheridan Martin Small , researchers at Microsoft, designed the printing dress!



You are probably familiar with the old saying, “You are what you eat” but how about, “You are what you tweet?” What if this concept were incorporated into garments of the future? Would you censor yourself, knowing you would reveal your statements to the world around you? The “Printing Dress” is an artistic piece that explores the notion of wearable text and its potential impact on the future of fashion, as well as our social identity. Built almost entirely of paper, the dress enables the wearer to enter “thoughts” on to its fabric and wear them as public art. By selecting materials and technologies that draw on the past, present, and future of communication media, we encourage viewers to reflect on the path that has brought us to ubiquitous digital communication and to contemplate its forward evolution.

Draw your music!

Designed by Jay Silver and Mitchel Resnick Drawdio lets you draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGuyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink...

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The next step after Rock Band... a real electric guitar!

Guitar Games - Revolutionizing How We Learn to Play Guitar

Aurelius Prochazka created a series of projects to help novice musicians to play the guitar. The brilliant idea here is that the more you train your ear to recognize what you hear, the more you will enjoy playing music. Because you'll understand what you're playing!

His most recent work, Guitar Games, allows you to plug in your standard 1/4" plug electric guitar, a Rock Band 3 guitar, or a MIDI guitar and play on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. Playing the guitar on small devices might not be the way to go, not to worry! If you own Rock Band, you owe it to yourself to take your guitar gaming to the next level and transfer all the experience you've amassed playing Rock Band into learning to play a real guitar!

Guitar Games teaches you how to play songs and how to hear better. Beyond that, it also helps you develop your own personal guitar playing style.

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You can try it out during Live Product Demo at Maker Faire on the San Mateo Fairgrounds May 21-22. If you're already a backer by then, come claim your free Guitar Games guitar pick!

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Our inspiration, always.

Max Mathews, the father of computer music.

Pulp-Based Computing: Building Computers Out of Paper

Marelo Coelho, Lyndl Hall and Joanna Berzowska have developed a series of techniques for building sensors, actuators and circuit boards that behave, look, and feel like paper.



By embedding electro-active inks, conductive threads and smart materials directly into paper during the papermaking process, they have created seamless composites that are capable of supporting new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at affordable costs.

Pulp-Based Computing: A Framework for Building Computers Out of Paper from Marcelo Coelho on Vimeo.

A nice 4$ (or less) touchpad!

Matthew Blackshaw created a nice 4$ (or less) touchpad with a copper-based matrix!

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Gestural manipulation of an actuated surface

Relief, created by Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii is an actuated tabletop display which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. A direct extension of this work, Recompose created by Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi, Dávid Lakatos, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, is the gesture control of such actuated surface.

By collectively utilizing the body as a tool for direct manipulation alongside gestural input for functional manipulation, we show how a user is afforded unprecedented control over an actuated surface. We describe a number of interaction techniques exploring the shared space of direct and gestural input, demonstrating how their combined use can greatly enhance creation and manipulation beyond unaided human capability.

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DIY combining random displays into a single, large virtual display.

The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets --- anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.



The Junkyard Jumbotron is designed by Rick Borovoy, Ph.D. and Brian Knep at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media.

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Get the code to install it on your displays, here.