The Parlour Trick, With Meredith Yayanos: A Spooky Joy

[Warren Ellis says:]
The Parlour Trick, With Meredith Yayanos: A Spooky Joy:
Meredith Yayanos is one of my oldest friends.  You may know her from arts journalism, from performing as a musician with Amanda Palmer or Jim Sclavunos’ The Vanity Set, or from co-founding COILHOUSE magazine.  Now, with multi-instrumentalist Dan Cantrell, she has formed The Parlour Trick in order to release the album A BLESSED UNREST.  And you can pre-order it, with various levels of additionally beauty, via Kickstarter.  It actually got funded within hours of going live.  But, please, click through.  If you like even some of the music you’ve heard here over the years, then I suspect you’ll enjoy this.  It’s an amazing record.

Interactive laser-cutter

[So cool. I’d really, really love to spend a month or so playing with one of these. -egg]

Interactive laser-cutter:

Constructable is an experimental laser-cutter from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. It uses a light-pen to direct the cutting beam, so that you can draw the cuts freehand, in realtime, rather than designing a pattern that is fed to the cutter. Basically, it transforms the cutter into a hand tool, rather than a programmable plotter.

Personal fabrication tools, such as laser cutters and 3D printers allow users to create precise objects quickly. However, working through a CAD system removes users from the workpiece. Recent interactive fabrication tools reintroduce this directness, but at the expense of precision.

Constructable is an interactive drafting table that produces precise physical output in every step. Users interact by drafting directly on the workpiece using a hand-held laser pointer. The system tracks the pointer, beautifies its path, and implements its effect by cutting the workpiece using a fast high-powered laser cutter.

Hasso-Plattner-Institut: constructable

(via Kottke)


Japanese firm offers expectant parents 3D-printed fetus from MRI scan

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Japanese firm offers expectant parents 3D-printed fetus from MRI scan

Tomohiro Kinoshita with 3D model of 9-month fetus in acrylic resin, and small phone charm. Photo: AFP.

A firm in Japan is offering expectant moms and dads the ability to purchase a 3D-printed model of their unborn child, for about $1200 USD. The “Shape of an Angel” is about 9cm, in white resin, encased in a transparent block that forms the shape of the mother’s body. The modeling data comes from an MRI scan.

“As it is only once in a lifetime that you are pregnant with that child, we received requests for these kind of models from pregnant women who… do not want to forget the feelings and experience of that time,” said Tomohiro Kinoshita of FASOTEC, the company offering the service.

It comes with a tiny little version version that can be used as a mobile phone trinket (young women in Japan often dress up their phones with little dangly adornments). More in the Australian paper The Age. (HT: @Gromit01)


Interactive laser-cutter

Sent to you via Google Reader

Interactive laser-cutter

Interactive laser-cutter

Constructable is an experimental laser-cutter from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. It uses a light-pen to direct the cutting beam, so that you can draw the cuts freehand, in realtime, rather than designing a pattern that is fed to the cutter. Basically, it transforms the cutter into a hand tool, rather than a programmable plotter.

Personal fabrication tools, such as laser cutters and 3D printers allow users to create precise objects quickly. However, working through a CAD system removes users from the workpiece. Recent interactive fabrication tools reintroduce this directness, but at the expense of precision.

Constructable is an interactive drafting table that produces precise physical output in every step. Users interact by drafting directly on the workpiece using a hand-held laser pointer. The system tracks the pointer, beautifies its path, and implements its effect by cutting the workpiece using a fast high-powered laser cutter.

Hasso-Plattner-Institut: constructable

(via Kottke)