Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Intriguing Motion, Modeling, Simulation Sofwares and More

SolidWorks [Link] Maya [Link]

PixLogic's ZBrush [Link] Draw and Sculpt with Digital stylus and Tablet
RealFlow FD Fluid Dynamics Simulation [Link]
Maxwell - the highest end Light Simulator + Particle Based Rendering [http://www.maxwellrender.com/] See also Vray [Link]

Metropolis Magazine Sept 2007 Article

An article about the Robotic Ecologies Lab was featured in the September 2007 issue of Metropolis Magazine: "Shape Shifters: Architecture Schools Use Robotics to Design Buildings That React to the Environment" by Jim Rendon. Click on this [link] to read the full article. Quoting from the article: Seth Edwards, a graduate of the program who also took the class, sees robotics as a way to make buildings more energy efficient and to connect them to the natural world. One of Johnson’s prototypes, for example, is a building that can be linked to real-time weather updates that would alert it to high winds and other extreme conditions, allowing it to cut wind resistance by changing its shape or to open a rainwater collection system when a storm is passing over. “If kinetic buildings can sense something going on in the environment and respond to it, they are no longer stale objects,” Edwards says. “They become more like plants—they are actually more connected to nature.”

Sunday, October 07, 2007

... we'll need to rethink a few things ...

1. Connecting: ... we'll need to rethink a few things ... A link to Prof. Michael Wesch's Digital Ethnography videos: The Machine is Us/ing Us [Link] A Vision ... [Link]
2. Sensing: If things knew when they were being used -- wouldn't we save a whole lot of energy? The "Power of Dreams" commercials by Honda. Here is the YouTube [Link].
3. Constructing: An intriguing project from the ETH in Zürich that uses information extracted directly from a 3D (digital) model to guide a robotic arm as it constructs a (physical) algorithmically generated serpentine brick wall (move over TJ!). [Link]. From Monocle: "The Gantenbein Winery, in Fläsch, Switzerland, has been the prototype for an entirely new approach to bricklaying: using modified industrial robots. Traditionally, the promise of industrial robots has been that they would replace the human workforce. But these projects, led by the Architecture and Digital Fabrication laboratory at ETH Zürich, demonstrate a different result: architects are free to create designs and patterns of a precision that simply could not be achieved by hand."