microspheres 6.849: geometric folding algorithms sam calisch main Acrylic Microspheres + Silicone Talking to my labmate Kenny Cheung one day this week, he told me about a project he'd started using the active ingedient in puffy paint, thermoplastic microspheres, to make material fold. Kenny's idea was that if the spheres were constrained on a side by an inextensible film, the expansion would cause the film to crease. As a test, I cast some simple strips on Kapton film. I used an oven with significant air movement to maintain consistent heating. Below are some pictures of the samples after baking. These experiments lead to my next attempt at this process. I sandwiched a large piece of Kapton between the masks, applied mold release to the plastic, and slathered the 121-30 through the slits. After curing, the surface residue can be rubbed off easily, leaving only the traces. Unfortunately, here the experiment goes awry. Files
Fitbit announces Flex fitness band with automatic syncing Check out our review of the FitBit Flex fitness band. Announced on the official Fitbit blog earlier this week, the health tracking company has developed a wristband version of the Fitbit One activity and sleep tracker. Called the Fitbit Flex, the wristband is designed to compete with the Nike+ FuelBand as well as the Jawbone Up fitness wristband. Rather than having to attach a Fitbit Zip or Fitbit One to an article of clothing,a Fitbit Flex user can wear the device 24 hours a day. While the wristband isn’t rated as being completely water-proof, the water-resistant rating means users can continue wearing the wristband while taking a shower or walking in the rain. Similar to the Fitbit One, the Fitbit Flex tracks how long you sleep during the night in addition to the amount of times you wake up in bed. Built into a section of the wristband, Fitbit product developers have included five LED lights that turn on during the day as a specific fitness goal is being reached.
9 Tritium Batteries - The 10 Coolest Technologies You've Never Heard Of - The Future of Tech Ever heard of bacterial photography—it's not as gross as it sounds—or chaos computing? 9 Tritium Batteries After years of advances in battery technology, many of our mobile gadgets still peter out before sunset on any given day. Several high-profile efforts are under way to fix this pesky problem, but one of the least pursued and yet most profound developments in energy technology is the battery that virtually never needs a recharge. For now, the technology is just for offbeat applications such as sensor networks for monitoring traffic and for communication satellites, not for consumer electronics. The BetaBattery is not based on chemical reaction. BetaBatt is also designing battery casings that are extremely resistant to heat and cold, so that the batteries can power sensors and electrical equipment in the most hostile environments—even in space.
Origami Bricks Loyalty Programs, Employee Motivation Gamification takes a digital experience—a platform for social interaction, an enterprise application, or learning system—and adds game mechanics to make it more effective and better targeted. Beyond badges and earning points, true gamification marries interaction design, psychology, and big data to enable personalized challenges, social competition, group collaboration, and meaningful rewards that truly motivate and engage employees, customers and online communities. And real engagement means more sales, stronger collaboration, better ROI, deeper employee loyalty, higher customer satisfaction and more. Bunchball Strategic and Alliance Partners Bunchball Nitro is the most widely used and most powerful gamification engine available. Why Gamification Is Good for Business Gamification is transforming business models by creating new ways to extend relationships, craft longer-term engagement, and drive customer and employee loyalty.
2 Chaos Computing - The 10 Coolest Technologies You've Never Heard Of - The Future of Tech 2 Chaos Computing The word chaos, as any Get Smart fan will tell you, tends to evoke negative connotations—it's a disordered situation we want to avoid. But if William Ditto is right—and both the U.S. Navy and private investors are betting he is—the word may soon be seen in a whole new light. Ditto, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville, is exploiting the principles of chaos to build a revolutionary computer chip that just may prove faster, cheaper, and far more flexible than traditional designs. Ditto's chip is like the microelectronic version of a stem cell: It's a device that can assume all sorts of different functions.
Parametric Pleating Custom Component Design with Paneling Tools Takeaways: Introduction to grid-based modeling with PanelingToolsMoving from paper folding inspiration to digital modelPaneling surfaces with custom componentsPreparing components for digital fabrication Prerequisites + Preparation: This course is suitable for all Creative Professionals: Artists, Architects, Designers, Engineers, Programmers, Students.All experience levels are welcome; however, we recommend that you are familiar with the Basics of Grasshopper and Kangaroo. See our online courses for more information.You will need to have Rhino 4SR9 or Rhino5 for Windows, Grasshopper 0.9.0014, and Paneling Tools Beta [April 5, 2012] installed prior to the start of the course. About the Instructors: Ronnie Parsons + Gil Akos are founding partners of Mode Collective. This course will provide an overview of the theory and practice of designing custom surface components with the grid-based modeling plug-in, PanelingTools. About This Online Course:
10 Viral Fashion - The 10 Coolest Technologies You've Never Heard Of - The Future of Tech Ever heard of bacterial photography—it's not as gross as it sounds—or chaos computing? 10 Viral Fashion Researchers at MIT's Media Lab are developing fashion accessories on which patterns and designs can change according to the wearer's whim, and fashion prints can be shared wirelessly. Taking cues from the online world and applying them to the fashion world is the goal of the Media Lab research project dubbed "urbanhermes." The idea is for OLED-integrated clothing to display digital images and designs, updating whenever the wearer desires. Each piece of clothing would also have user-set permissions that could allow or disallow this propagation. While the idea of OLED-integrated clothing is not new, MIT's approach to viral propagation is innovative.
10 Mind-blowing Sci-Fi Technologies That Really Exist Technology Science fiction is one of the oldest genres in literature, with its roots tracing all the way back to the days of mythology. Sci-fi can be fanciful, extreme, even downright insane, but what separates it from fantasy is that it commonly relies on technology which, in at least some respects, could actually be feasible. That’s not to say that you’ll be drafted for the next lightsaber battle on Mars anytime soon – but if there’s one thing we’ve learned from history, it’s that “real” science often does take its ideas straight from the pages of sci-fi. For example… Automated Driverless Cars The 2002 film Minority Report was futuristic sci-fi at its sleekest. The Google Driverless Car was the first real-world attempt that gained widespread public recognition, even after those videos of it running over traffic cones. We don’t remember this being in any sci-fi movies – but dang it, it totally should have been. Data That Lasts Forever Or can it? And relatively speaking, that’s old news.
Research Projects TT's Page Top Tomohiro TACHI Composite Rigid-Foldable Curved Origami Structure In this study, we show a family of multilayered rigid-foldable and flat-foldable vault structures, which can be designed by constructing rigid-foldable curved folded tubular arches and assembling the arches to construct cellular structures. The resulting vault structure form an overconstrained mechanism. Tomohiro Tachi, "Composite Rigid-Foldable Curved Origami Structure", in Proceedings of Transformables 2013, Seville, Spain, September 18-20, 2013. Elastic Origami In this research, we propose a novel computational method to simulate and design origami whose form is governed by the equilibrium of forces from the elastic bending of each panel. Tomohiro Tachi, "Interactive Form-Finding of Elastic Origami", in Proceedings of IASS 2013, Wroclaw, Poland, September 23-27, 2013. Freeform Origami Tessellations based on Generalized Resch's Patterns Rigid-Foldable Cylinders and Cells collaboration with Koryo Miura Kushakusha
Chaos computing Chaos computing is the idea of using chaotic systems for computation. In particular, chaotic systems can be made to produce all types of logic gates and further allow them to be morphed into each other. Introduction[edit] Chaotic systems generate large numbers of patterns of behavior and are irregular because they switch between these patterns. They exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions which, in practice, means that chaotic systems can switch between patterns extremely fast. Modern digital computers perform computations based upon digital logic operations implemented at the lowest level as logic gates. A chaotic morphing logic gate consists of a generic nonlinear circuit that exhibits chaotic dynamics producing various patterns. Chaotic Morphing[edit] As an example of how chaotic morphing works, lets take a generic chaotic system known as the Logistic map. ChaoGate[edit] A Chaotic computer, made up of a lattice of ChaoGates, has been demonstrated by Chaologix Inc. Research[edit]