It's a busy week in terms of visitors: Albrecht came up again to talk about the TUI design project we've been working on for a while. He gave a well-attended talk at the School, where he was discussed the potential, challenges and implications of a world saturated with displays and sensors. Both Tanja and Bastian from his group were here as well, and we made great progress in preparing a prototype for the workshop we'll be running in two weeks' time. On Wednesday night, Nic Villar joined the party and brought with him the rapid prototyping toolkit for electronic devices as well as a sample of a material that opens up interesting design possibilities.
He showed us how easy it is to create devices using his toolkit. The hardware side comes down to connecting various parts using thin standardised cables, and the software side is fully integrated with Visual Studio, so its a matter of selecting classes from contextual menus. He built a device integrating a rotary control and a small OLED screen and had it up and running in less than five minutes. Quite impressive (and also highly complementary to what we've been working on around here). It's easy to imagine how this could be very useful to physically prototype devices very quickly.
The other surprise he pulled out of his bag was a material I hadn't heard about before, Polymorph. It a plastic-like granulate that sticks together and becomes formable at around 60 degrees Celsius. When it cools down it becomes rigid again. The process is repeatable numerous times without any apparent deterioration of the material (unlike Fimo or Hama beads, which once heated and cooled can't be changed anymore). We all had quite a good time playing with it. This obviously has quite a bit of potential not only with respect to prototyping physical shapes but also with respect to create objects that physically change shape...
