ease of consumer-level customization (a
characteristic property of digital media)
to architectural space makes printable
architecture an important development
toward the digitization of the built
environment.
Printing out entire habitable
buildings may well be the holy grail
of printable architecture, but existing
efforts (such as USC’s Contour Crafting)
have not quite reached a level where we
can expect practical usage in the short-term future. At the furniture/interior
scale, 3D printing is already fully
feasible, and one can find many products
on the market fabricated using this
technology, as well as directions/files
to print one’s own for DI Y hobbyists
with access to the necessary facilities.
Technologies other than additive
manufacturing are being investigated
as well. For example, ETH Zurich’s
Flight Assembled Architecture explores
the use of quadcopters as robotic
construction workers (note: I am using
the word printable as a catch-all term
for digital automated fabrication.
While HCI has embraced digital
fabrication research in recent years,
the central focus is on developing
techniques for printing out functional
objects (such as optics and electronic
devices), and contributions to printable
architecture itself have so far been
minimal. However, there has been a
long, respectable line of work on digital
design tools aimed at making 3D design
more accessible for non-professional
users, which should constitute an
indispensable part of the printable
architecture ecosystem.
I have recently begun my
own experiments with printable
architecture. Contrary to the majority
of existing work, my concern lies not in
printing entire houses or even furniture,
but rather in printing out gardens and
natural landscapes. As a first step, I have
built a printer that fabricates freeform
hydroponic gardens (Figure 10). A huge
potential of printable architecture, in
my view, lies in its capacity to easily
fabricate environmental elements
that had not lent themselves well to
conventional, large-scale industrial
manufacturing processes.
SAL IN A WORLD OF
HABITABLE BITS
So what will our future lives be like
in a world built of habitable bits? As
research into this area is still at an S
Projection-based (or spatial )
augmented reality represents another
important variation of augmented
architecture technology. The
introduction of Microsoft Kinect
has made a huge impact in this area,
making projection onto large, complex
environments easier and leading to
works such as IllumiROOM by Jones
et al. Provided there will be sufficient
increases in the power output of
compact projectors, we may eventually
see wearable projectors (a concept
popularized by MIT’s SixthSense)
capable of producing visual illusions
that can fill up entire rooms.
The reliance on (relatively) cheap
mobile/wearable devices makes
augmented architecture perhaps
the most cost-effective of the three
key approaches. In the future, I
expect innovations in both software
and hardware to lead to a series of
lightweight, always-on wearables
(glasses, headsets, etc.) that collectively
operate on the full range of human
sensation to create compelling
experiences of living within a freely
transformable environment.
PRINTABLE ARCHITECTURE
Printable architecture (Figure 9)
refers to a class of technologies that
automatically fabricate architectural
structures from digital files
using techniques such as additive
manufacturing (aka 3D printing).
Unlike the other two key approaches,
printable architecture does not
support actual transformations of
environments; structures can merely
be replaced with newly printed ones.
Even with this limitation, however, the
potential to bring the high degree and
P
Figure 6. ClayVision, a vision-based augmented reality system that enables freeform
transformations of buildings. A new implementation using custom glasses (instead of a tablet
as shown here) is under way. Collaboration with Ken Perlin.
Figure 7. Weightless Wall, a system that uses custom headsets to create perceptions of virtual
sound-blocking walls.
Figure 8. Gilded Gait, a pair of haptic insoles that alter perceptions of ground texture using
vibrotactile feedback.