This is cool!

[Walt Langhans]

Check this out guys!

http://www.wired.com/design/2012/11/whittling-with-lasers/

[Lee DeRaud]

I'll get excited about it when I see them demo the "move", "delete", "stretch", and "shrink" tools.

"Hey, tired of typing a whole page before you print it? We've invented this cool tool that prints as you type...we call it the 'typewriter'!"

[Frank Corker]

The demo on the video was very impressive but it would have to take a lot of other input to make that as good as they showed. I like the idea of the tracing circles, that seemed to execute a perfectly sized hole. I doubt it will be long before we will be able to draw the lines directly onto a substrate and then the laser engraver will just follow the lines directly after scanning it.

[Lee DeRaud]

The demo on the video was very impressive but it would have to take a lot of other input to make that as good as they showed. I like the idea of the tracing circles, that seemed to execute a perfectly sized hole.It executed a perfectly shaped hole; I didn't see anything on the demo that indicated it would be easy to make two holes the same size. As far as shape is concerned, the freehand tool in Corel does that already, at least if you're using a tablet rather than a mouse. ("Smart-shape"? Something like that.)
I doubt it will be long before we will be able to draw the lines directly onto a substrate and then the laser engraver will just follow the lines directly after scanning it.How is that different from drawing pencil-on-paper, scanning, and vectorizing in Corel or whatever? Or using a graphics tablet to draw into Corel?

I'm obviously missing the coolness factor here...

[Scott Shepherd]

Did anyone else watch it and think "That's fake"?

Either that's some incredible technology or it's fake. How in the world would it know from a freehand sketch of a rectangle that it was in that location? Then to come back and put radii on each corner, from putting a "pen" on the glass above each corner and then make a radius motion for each corner? How'd it know?

It might very well be real, but my cynical side said it's fake right from the go.

[Martin Boekers]

I may not be as cynical to believe it's fake, though could be. Not sure why it's a laser pointer, maybe better than a stylus on graphic moniters that you can draw directly on.
So tech is there. I could see a program that could do the corners and stuff, heck we have join curves now so is it a stretch to imagine you rough draw a circle or square,
software makes it round or corners, then the software positions it? Not so far fetched.

I think it's interesting, is it something we could use and make a fortune on, I think not. Frank, wouldn't this be fun for you to play with in "realtime" with such a wonderful sketcher you are?

Thanks Walt for posting this, things like this are fun to see from time to time, I'm sure many things become non-post because people feel that some will give a bunch of negative response and
not take it for what it is.

Heck Lee, I can tell you how many reports I made in my school days that "white out" actually seeped through the paper, or how mant trees sacrificed their life for reports that were needing retyping
for various reason. Thank the Lord word word documents. :)

[Lee DeRaud]

Heck Lee, I can tell you how many reports I made in my school days that "white out" actually seeped through the paper, or how mant trees sacrificed their life for reports that were needing retyping for various reason. Thank the Lord word word documents. :)Amen to that. My point was pretty much that this whole thing looked like a giant leap backwards.

[Scott Shepherd]

I've looked at it again and went to the creators website and looked through that. My end result....I don't get it. How would you ever do anything other than "rough" everything in? If I'm on the glass above the table with a laser pointer that it's reading, sure, it knows because I have the "rectangle pen" that I want to use a rectangle, but how does it know I want a rectangle that's 5.5" x 9.2"? Then, how will it know I want a 1/2" radius on there and not a 3/8" radius?

The only way it would know that would be to input the dimensions and once you do that, you're back to not needing the pens in the first place. Heck, buy a Cintiq for $2,000 and let it rip with brushes, etc.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SdxuA1WjY&feature=player_embedded

[Walt Langhans]

Did anyone else watch it and think "That's fake"?

Wired is a reputable source of info, but yeah I did a double take as well.

I don't think, at least at this point, it's really a production tool, and more of something that would be neat to mess with, however that Cintiq is pretty bad a$$!

[Lee DeRaud]

I've looked at it again and went to the creators website and looked through that. My end result....I don't get it. How would you ever do anything other than "rough" everything in? If I'm on the glass above the table with a laser pointer that it's reading, sure, it knows because I have the "rectangle pen" that I want to use a rectangle, but how does it know I want a rectangle that's 5.5" x 9.2"? Then, how will it know I want a 1/2" radius on there and not a 3/8" radius?

The only way it would know that would be to input the dimensions and once you do that, you're back to not needing the pens in the first place. Heck, buy a Cintiq for $2,000 and let it rip with brushes, etc.Exactly. This is hardly new tech, and the only thing somewhat unique about it is the cut-as-you-go aspect, which IMHO is a bug not a feature.

[john passek]

On OCC yesterday Paul Jr showed off his new venture of doing grafic presentations such as commercials and demos of equipment they build.
The technology they were using was quite similar to this , they did not elaborate on the technology or give the name of the program they were using but it was impressive.
I've also seen on TV , gaming programers also use this type of tech to build games with incredible clearity. not sure if it operates the same

[Lee DeRaud]

I've also seen on TV , gaming programers also use this type of tech to build games with incredible clearity. not sure if it operates the sameI'm trying to figure out what in the heck a gaming programmer would do with a laser cutter, and I'm drawing a complete blank. Somebody want to explain it to me in small words, or has this thread completely jumped the shark?

[Scott Shepherd]

Lee, I think he meant the technology of creating items using a pen tool like that, where gaming programmers are probably dragging and dropping a lot of stuff to build entire scenes in 3D games. That's my guess on what he meant, not anything to do with the laser itself.

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee, I think he meant the technology of creating items using a pen tool like that, where gaming programmers are probably dragging and dropping a lot of stuff to build entire scenes in 3D games. That's my guess on what he meant, not anything to do with the laser itself.Ah, that actually makes sense.

I got my Wacom tablet in early 2005, and I think they already had a Cintiq tablet/monitor combo available at that time, although I assume the new ones are a lot better. At any rate, that kind of direct manipulation isn't really new tech, just the usual filtering-down to the consumer level. I'd be astonished if the pro game programmers weren't using it before then.