A milestone in 3D printing

Here comes the copyright infringement question concerning 3D printed objects. As 3D printers are getting much less expensive, one can expect a soon to be time when a certain number of objects will be home made. Of course, objects can be designed with a 3D software, but a shortcut would be to scan the original piece and simply copy it.

But we can expect finding online specialised sites which will offer, free of charge or for a small amount, ready to print 3D files. This new market will probably bring up the same problems we are witnessing with music and video downloading:

As soon as some smart ass will create an equivalent to DivX/ MP3 compression standard, 3D files will be easy to get and millions of artefacts, originally designed and produced by industries, are going to be scanned, available and shared online.

While the already obsolete war on piracy is on, it seems that no one has yet anticipated the forecoming problem, as well as the complete market revolution that will occur. Cheers!
Texte by Armand Dauré 


The next Napster? Copyright questions as 3D printing comes of age by Peter Hanna

Erik de Bruijn, co-founder of 3D printing company Ultimaker, working on his 3D printer.
Photo by soulfish

 Read this very interesting article: arstechnica.com

A very interesting illustration: The Penrose triangle

The Penrose triangle, also known as the Penrose tribar, is an impossible object. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. The mathematician Roger Penrose independently devised and popularised it in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form". It is featured prominently in the works of artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it.

The tribar appears to be a solid object, made of three straight beams of square cross-section which meet pairwise at right angles at the vertices of the triangle they form.

How to draw the impossible triangle

Made from three 8-inch boards of wood.

It was done in AutoCAD R14

Using Solidworks

In SketchUp

Penrose Triangle In SketchUp

3D printing

Be Your Own Souvenir!

3D has become a street attraction.

"This proposal aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying spaces and their own realities. The installation was enjoyed during two weekends in January 2011 by the tourists, neighbours of La Rambla and citizens of Barcelona, a city that faces a trade-off between identity and gentrification, economic sustainability and economic growth.

This shapes through a technological ritual where the audience is released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.

The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites him/her to perform as a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of him/herself printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured light scanners (kinect).

The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.

Dataflow

All the software used in this project is free and open. Custom software has been developed using openFrameworks and openKinect in order to produce a tunable full 360 degree point cloud. Using a midi controller, the three differents input pointclouds (3 Kinects) can be adjusted in space and resolution. The resulting combined point cloud is processed by Meshlab to produce a mesh reconstruction. Skeinforge takes the mesh, previously cleaned up through Blender, and outputs a gcode file, which can feed a cnc machine (Rapman 3.1)."  blablabLAB

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