Reverberating Across the Divide is the name of a design project that does a pretty spectacular job of marrying 3D scanning, gesture controlled 3D modelling, and 3D printing. Using squids.
Okay, it’s a little more complicated than designer Madeline Gannon forcing squids to create Geiger-esk objects for her, although that would be awesome. What she’s doing is using a 3D rendered squid as you would use a “brush” tool in photoshop. By starting with a 3D scanned subject, she can use the ‘squid brush’ to create elaborate 3 dimensional objects that will fit seamlessly onto her subjects bodies. The finished object is then printed out, I’m assuming assembled, and then worn.
Reverberating Across the Divide: Digital Design Meets Physical Context from Madeline Gannon on Vimeo.
She’s called the process Chronomorphology. That would be a modern re-conceptualisation of Chronophotography, that old-timey Victorian photographic technique of taking several pictures of a subject in motion and interacting with their environment and stringing them together as a series of pictures, almost like a really boring comic.
Chronomorphology uses the same concept, by animating and stringing together 3D images of the same 3D object slowly moving, or interacting, within a 3D space, Gannon can create a rendered 3 dimensional model of that object’s movements in that space in relation to a 3D scanned object. Essentially, this allows the ‘squid brush’ to paint itself in 3D around the body of the 3D scanned person. The object that is created is not just made to fit a person’s body, but their body is actually affecting and influencing the movements and rendering of the finished object. Pretty amazing stuff.
We’ve seen wearable art designed to fit a specific person before of course, but personally I think Reverberating Across the Divide is far more interesting. And not because it isn’t just black spaghetti thrown on a models face.
This is a blueprint for the future of clothing design. Granted our future clothes won’t be made using squids, but it isn’t hard to imagine our ‘squid brush’ being replaced with a more conventional object, like say a brush meant to mimic the drape of fabric that can then be printed in cotton or silk and fit the subject as perfectly as a squid collar. Squid collars are cool.
Please go check out Madlab.cc for more great images and descriptions of the process with even bigger words.
