Hi all,
I am a new Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Tovi Grossman, and I am
coordinating an HCI guest talk next week.
Thijs Roumen (PhD student from Hasso Plattner Insitute, Germany) will give
a talk on *Feb. 24th (Wed) @ 10-11am (EST). *Thijs will be presenting his
work on portable laser cutting techniques (more details below). We will be
using the zoom link below.
zoom link (pc: 909215): https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83764572467
Thijs's website: http://www.thijsroumen.eu/
*Speaker's Biography*
Thijs Roumen is a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction in the lab of
Patrick Baudisch, Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He received
his MSc from the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg in 2013 and BSc
from the Technical
University of Eindhoven, Netherlands in 2011. Between the PhD and master he
worked
at the National University of Singapore as a Research Assistant with
Shengdong Zhao.
His research interests are in personal fabrication, digital collaboration
and enabling
increased complexity for laser cutting. His papers are published as full
papers in top-tier
ACM conferences CHI and UIST. He serves on several ACM program committees
including ACM UIST.
*Talk title*
Portable Laser Cutting
*Abstract*
Laser-cut 3D models shared online tend to be basic and trivial—models build
over long periods of time and by multiple designers are few/nonexistent. I
argue that this is caused by a lack of an exchange format that would allow
continuing the work. At first glance, it may seem like such a format
already exist, as laser cut models are already widely shared in the form of
2D cutting plans. However, such files are susceptible to variations in
cutter properties (aka kerf) and do not allow modifying the model in any
meaningful way (no adjustment of material thickness, no parametric changes,
etc.). I consider this format machine specific.
My first take on the challenge is to see how far we can get by still
building on the de-facto
standard, i.e., 2D cutting plans. I tackled the challenge by rewriting 2D
cutting plans, replacing non-portable elements with portable ones. However,
this comes at a cost of extra incisions, reducing the structural integrity
of models and impacting aesthetic qualities and rare mechanisms or joints
may go undetected. I thus take a more radical approach, which is to move to
a 3D exchange format (kyub). This eliminates these challenges, as it
guarantees portability by generating a new machine-specific 2D file for the
local machine when exported. Instead, it raises the question of
compatibility: Files already exist in 2D—how to get them into 3D? I
demonstrate a software tool to reconstruct the 3D geometry of the model
encoded in a 2D cutting plan, allows modifying it using a 3D editor, and
re-encodes it to a 2D cutting plan. I demonstrate how this approach allows
me to make a much wider range of modifications, including scaling, changing
material thickness, and even remixing models.
The transition from sharing machine-oriented 2D cutting files, to 3D files,
enables users
worldwide to collaborate, share, and reuse. And thus, to move on from users
creating
thousands of trivial models from scratch to collaborating on big complex
projects.
Hope to see many of you there!
Yan
-------
Postdoctoral Fellow, https://chensivan.github.io/
