Back in 2002 when I left corporate life to become my own boss, hoping to move into a combination of real and virtual design (even though something like Second Life hadn’t even yet popped up on the radar), I didn’t realize that metaversal consulting would so completely occupy my time as it does now; finding myself swamped to the point of my not being able to spend more time pursuing the things Second Life makes possible. And while of no legitimate importance to anyone else, those things are at least important to me. Consequently, after delivering an important batch of files last Friday, I spent some time surfing around to see what others have been doing to bridge the transreality gap and that led me to John Hurliman’s blog entry “Exporting Prim Data From Second Life” (Link). Needless to say his post resonated with me on several counts, so I’ll be keeping tabs on his progress. It would be great to have a two-way connection between Second Life and Blender.

I don’t recall if I’d previously read about this or not, but I’d not seen it: the Fab@Home additive-process, rapid prototyping device (Link), here shown creating a watch strap. It’s a nice resource site with plenty of information and apparently plenty more to come. I’ve not done much more than skim through the site but it’s a link I’ll be visiting with some regularity.

Besides the device itself, of interest to me both on the Fab@Home site and on the RepRap blog which alerted me to it a couple of days ago (Link) are discussions about 3D fab catalogues. There is a “Printables” library (Link) on the Fab@Home wiki and a new, anticipatory centralized location for RepRap parts (Link) that seems… ambitious. I’ll be very interested to see the first fruits.

Probably goes without saying that I’ve been thinking about just such things for quite some time. Recently I told someone how an immersive 3D catalog might be accomplished (I’ve been grinding on how to do it for years – since I first started modding Quake 3 – but I’ve always run into content theft issues). Maybe they or someone else will get something like it up and running. It’d be a trip to have that weapons warehouse scene from “The Matrix” play out in a virtual world.

{Image source: Fab@Home}

Okay, I’ll admit to not seeing a practical use for this at the moment; seems like this is the beginning of a whole new section in the dictionary beneath “shaky-cam” (“shaky-furniture”, “shaky-housewares”, “shaky-surgical tools”, etc). One thing for sure though: it beautifully illustrates the rapidly dissolving barrier between thought and physical thing. Definitely worth watching.

You can find pictures of the completed objects over on the FrontDesign website (Link).

{Update: you can view the official video here: frontfilm on YouTube (Link)}

via Core77

See the above image? That’s from Alienware’s website (Link) in which it is an embedded background. Alienware is owned by Dell Computer, a very big corporation. So big that every executive officer currently listed on the Yahoo Finance page makes a seven-figure salary. See the image below?
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I couldn’t have timed this bit of news any better, coming as it does on the heels of the Nissan virtual vehicle dispenser in Second Life: the Mass Customization blog brings word (Link) of what is possibly the first working prototype for a shoe created using one of the technologies most often associated with rapid manufacturing. From the post:

Today, I had the opportunity to have the world’s first working prototype of a totally new shoe concept in my hands: a 100% laser-sintered shoe.

…

The TNO shoe concept, named ‘Head over Heels’, is the first application of rapid (digital) manufacturing technologies (more about RM) to an entire product in the footwear industry. Such a concept would allow the rapid customization of shoes to a radical extreme – without any of the constraints of conventional custom manufacturing mechanisms like the need for custom lasts, custom cutting of materials, and a new organization of the work process in manufacturing.

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