Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2015 19:13:30 -0700
From: Matthias Graf
Subject: Re: Dynamic drafting paper, or sketchpad in the world
I gathered some tools you might expect on an actual drafting table and played with some ideas (videos attached).

A physical solver for geometric constraints:

bla

and projection used as a way to scale, rotate and shear objects:

bla2

-Matthias

Am 10.10.2015 um 15:53 schrieb Toby Schachman:
Matthias and I have been thinking about ways we could replace the combscript workflow for laser CAD with something physical, on the table, at full scale. Matthias had mentioned that the thing we need to exploit is the idea of having multiple physical tools used in combination, multiple sheets of paper, etc., using these analog advantages in place of the affordances we're used to on the screen.

I'm building on this idea, Alexander's idea of start whole and add detail, and the ways I've been sketching on the whiteboard before I hit combscript. The advantage of the laser, besides being able to cut materials that are hard to cut with scissors, is the extreme precision you can get. And the advantage of sketching on paper/whiteboard is how quickly and fluidly you can think through a rough idea. So let's combine these two, using a Sketchpad workflow of draw first, constrain after.

Attached is a video mockup of how this might look. I do the first steps of the shelves I designed yesterday, laying out the grid system with measurements.

(Excuse the sloppy lighting :P )

Inline
            image 1

Think of it as "magic paper".

You draw on it with special pens, each a different color, each with different semantics. For example red means horizontal/vertical straight line, blue means length measurement, black means freehand curve, etc.

This enables you to draw freely while also specifying constraints. The paper adjusts itself under you.

This could be realized further using projection. Or a workflow with a camera watching your drawing and a printer spitting out precision-adjusted iterations whenever you hit a button, just like Sketchpad's "solve constraints" button.


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