School:
Carnegie Mellon University
Video Link:
https://vimeo.com/121804034
Project Webpage:
http://www.madlab.cc/tactum/
Description:
Tactum is an augmented modeling tool that lets you design 3D printed wearables directly on your body. It uses depth sensing and projection mapping so a person can simply touch, poke, rub, or pinch the geometry projected onto their arm to customize ready-to-print, ready-to-wear forms.
Describe your Maker-project. Highlight its goals and key outcomes.
The body is a very complex canvas for digital design. Creating t
hings that come in direct contact with the skin require
deep considerations for ergonomic fit.
However today, we tend to design wearables in virtual environments that ignore the body.
This leads to a lot of guess work as how a design might behave on the body once worn.
What if, instead … we could just remove all this guess-work,
and you could just digitally design these wearables directly on your body?
Tactum lets design ready-to-print, ready-to-wear artifacts directly on your skin. This augmented 3D modeling tool integrates depth sensing and projection mapping to turn your skin into
an interactive canvas for designing wearables.
Skin-centric gestures, such as
touching, poking, or pinching your skin, let you play with and adjust digital geometry that is the projected back onto your arm. Once a desired design is achieved, the user can immediately export the model for 3D printing.
What was the process, skills and tools used to prepare this project.
Tactum sends a designer’s tactile interactions with their skin to a virtual modeling environment.
These interactions manipulate ready-to-print geometry that is inherently sized to fit back on the body.
Tactum extracts features from the user's body to generate the interactive digital geometry that is projected onto the skin. This embeds a level of ergonomic intelligence into the form: wearable designs are inherently sized to fit the designer. In addition, Tactum also embeds 3D printing fabrication constraints into the geometry. No matter how the designer manipulates the projected forms, every design is always ready to be 3D printed and worn back on the body.
Tactum has been used to create a series of physical artifacts around the forearm. These test different kinds of interactive geometries, materials, modeling modes, and fabrication machines. Below shows PLA print made from a standard desktop 3D printer, a nylon and rubber print made from a Selective-Laser Sinter (SLS) 3D printer, and rubbery print made from a Stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer.
Why does this work Make Impact? Describe the major innovations, impacts or successes of the project.
As an interface, Tactum innovates in how we bring techniques in 'digital making' into our physical world. It eliminates the screens, mouse, and keyboards of traditional 3D modeling software, and instead, lets novice users manipulate digital forms directly with their hands.
Moreover,
Tactum's intuitive interactions enable anyone – regardless of their technical experience or background – to design in the virtual realm, then fabricate & wear it physically. By mitigating the technical overhead for 3D printing, we aspire to empower a wider audience participate with this incredible technology.