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.