14 DAY TRIAL // Looking at a 3D object on a normal screen is all well and good, especially if you have this sort of high-speed gesture recognition system. Seeing it “for real” will always beat virtual rendering though.
That's why the latest invention from Ryan Smith, lead 3D artist at a company called Technical Illusions, could score quite a few orders for his augmented reality headset.
The glasses are basically meant to let you preview a 3D print before you send it to a MakerBot replicator for manufacture, or whatever other 3D printer you have on hand.
Smith started from a Cast AR headset (funded by Kickstarter last year), then drilled holes into the retroreflective material on the Makerbot Replicator 3D printer itself.
Then, he placed a semi-transparent overlay on the front window of the printer.
So, once that was done and he put the glasses on, he could see the 3D print in the printer, even without it having actually been done yet. It's like looking into the future through a pair of high-tech shades.
It should help artists and engineers who need to scale things up or down, as the visualization of an object inside the printer comes across as more revealing than doing it on a computer screen.
Ryan Smith thinks that, eventually, glasses like this one, and those special windows, could (and should) become part of all 3D printers.
