Remaking the Springy Thingy

Classic

Birdy-Wirdy

Megatron

The Springy-Thingy project started off when Jimmy Shen (M.Arch) came to me in fall'05 and asked me whether we could create a modeling tool which will behave like a pencil - with all the nuances of speed and movement affecting the quality of the sketch model. I was in the middle of some dry Lisp hacking - battling through algorithms, lists and matrices. I wanted to relax and play around a bit then and Jimmy's project came in at an opportune moment. SpringyThingy evolved over three weeks in Studio-5 and then SMarchS studio at 4-331. Jimmy went on to generate his D-Haus using our tool and managed to 3d print his sketch in the Z-Corp. We impressed ourselves with the comprehensiveness of our system - from a simple sketch to physical model in quick time. We realised that we had set foot on something interesting.

We spent another semester working on it further, redoing a lot of things from scratch. We learnt and unlearnt a lot...

(will continue on my flight, getting late)

PS:
If you want to play around with the thingy - http://fathead.mit.edu/springythingy/