ben® Color Capture™ VS ColorSnap™

Paint companies Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams recently released color applications for the iPhone. So, which one is the best?

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A free CAD resource for digital designers

Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create a resource of free, high quality files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses.
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Detail of an ‘Oasis in a Corn Desert’ by Min|Day

The Lake Cabinet by Min|Day is the primary built feature in the master bedroom of a vacation house on a lake in rural Iowa. The Lake Cabinet challenges the modernist notion of the detail as the expression of a joint {between two or more elements}. The piece is essentially an 11’-4” x 6’-0” x 1’-6” storage cabinet lifted 12” above the floor. The architect studied the form of water ripples from several photographs of the lake. From these they developed a range of parameters for a computer animation of the behavior and interference of rippling water. The result is a massive cabinet with a surprisingly supple surface quality.
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Under the tuition of Arthur Hash, State University of New York at New Paltz uses Ponoko to teach students digital manufacturing.

The Master of Fine Arts Program in Metal/Jewelry at the State University of New York at New Paltz has been ranked #1 in the nation in the recent 2009 U.S. News & World Report list of America’s best graduate schools.
The Metal/Jewelry graduate program ranked first in the nation in the Fine Arts category. In addition, New Paltz’s Master of Fine Arts Program overall was named among the 100 best in America, according to U.S. News.
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The Brand in your Hand…..

Reebok has launched the very first shoe customization application, allowing users to customize and buy their uniquely designed trainers right from their mobile phones.

Inside Mobile was the agency that created the application. “Your Reebok” is now available in the iPhone App Store in Britain and the United States only…..

“The strategy was to develop a mobile service that embodied the theories of long-tail marketing - mass individualization - by delivering an application that was about people and not technology or marketing,” said Dusan Hamlin, managing director of Inside Mobile.

The application offers three of Reebok’s most iconic silhouettes: The Freestyle, the Classic Leather and the Ventilator.
The designer/consumer can change up to 23 different areas of the shoe with a choice of 19 colors, four material options and adding personalized text. The designs can either be shared with friends or the whole world direct from the application via GPS map etc…

This isn’t Reebok’s first mobile initiative. Reebok launched a mobile social networking campaign to promote its Freestyle Hi model by letting targeted consumers interact with the shoe design in December 2008. The campaign let consumers design their own shoe and send it in to itsmy.com, share it with friends and put it in the background of their page, but this is the first mobile customization application that closes the sale…..

I would love to know what anyone in the U.S. or U.K. that has a chance to try the application thinks??

Those of us in lesser countries can live vicariously through you or watch the video of the app in use on YouTube..

Via Mobile Marketer

There is a great post on ArdunioFun.com showing a couple of kids using Ponoko cut parts and Arduino to make a cool little robot walker based on a design posted on Instructables. I have to admit I was a little blown away to see the age of the kids constructing the robot in the photos as at that age I was probably melting burger rings packets in the oven to make a keyring or something just as inane.

Imagine how empowered they must feel to be able to have access to electronics, laser cutters and a community sharing ideas freely online. Imagine what they will be doing with these tools in ten years time with their shared experiences and comfort with these tools of design and production..

Rock on Rachel and Drew.

Customize Home Screen to Include Ponoko Blog

Those of you who are wondering how we blog contributors keep up to date with all of the latest happenings in the world of design, digital manufacturing, mass customization etc.. may be interested to know a couple little tricks..

Primarily for me it is a case of obsessively monitoring RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Twitter, StumbleUpon along with academic journals, books and podcasts.

If I ever have a spare minute between meetings, waiting for a file to render or just need some time out, I hit my Ponoko icon on the homescreen of my iPhone which gives me a feed of what is happening on the Ponoko site, from there I go on to check the rest of my RSS feeds.

To do this on the iPhone simply open the Ponoko site in Safari, hit the + button and select ‘Add to Home Screen’.

A Family of Free Web Tools for Remote 3D Reconstruction

Maarten Vergauwen and Luc Van Gool have developed a group of web tools, allowing users to upload digital images to their servers where they perform a 3D reconstruction of the scene and report the output back to the user. They also provide a tool for producing and visualising the 3D scene using the data computed from their servers. Originally developed for the use of 3D information in the field of cultural heritage now everybody can now make pictures in 3D, with a regular photo camera and the free ARC 3D website.

You only have to take a number of pictures from an object from different angles, load it onto the website and you will be notified when you can pick up the 3D photo from the ARC 3D ftp-site. With the ARC 3D model viewer you can generate your 3D model, ready for viewing on the internet. For this you need to save it as a vrml or x3d file and download a 3D viewer from the internet for viewing in a webbrowser. You can also save the model in other higher quality formats. The free MeshLab software provides professional tools to enable you to refine and enhance your 3D model.

Just in case you could not pick it, the photo of the Baptisterium, Pisa, Italy is above or left, and the 3D model on the right or below…. (Photo: Bas Bogaerts)

Thanks to my new friends at FreeFormFab

Looks like Raven has some competition. Vector Magic is an “online auto tracer” that aims to create the cleanest vector tracing of a bitmap image in the easiest way possible.

To test it out, I took the Ponoko logo from the main site and made it half the size. That’s 100 x 45 pixels at 72 dpi, a pretty blurry image. I uploaded the logo from my desktop and was prompted to select what kind of image it was: a photograph, an anti-aliased logo, or a non anti-aliased logo. The software correctly guesses that mine is an anti-aliased logo, so I confirm and continue.

Next, I was asked about the quality of my image. I selected Low even though it’s just small, not interpolated or degraded.

I thought this next step was pretty cool. (more…)

For those of you who are users of Shapeways for your 3D printing needs you must check out a user generated script (for 3D studio max) to calculate pricing, volume and verifies polycount.

Virtox created the script to calculate the price of your object, in the same way the site does it for you, but without the hassle of uploading, waiting etc
The interface, except volume calculation, is updated in realtime.

Features include

Volume in CC
Shapeways price for selected material
Final price including VAT, markup

Extras

VAT selection
Target Pricing - Calculates scale which will meet target price
Scaled Pricing - Calculate price based on scaling
Polycount warning/bailout if over 500.000

You can download the script here

This is a great example of a user contributing to a community of peers to enable them to realise their own designs that little bit easier.

nice work Stijn van der Linden

via Fabaloo