From cloud computing to personal fabrication

Surfing on the Internet this week I found Daniel Davis blog Digital Morphogenesis. I bumped into his last post HTML5 & WebGL where he introduces us to WebGL and its importance for CAD modeling. I am not an expert on these topics and Daniel’s article really helped me to understand what’s going on so I am going to share it with you.
Using a browser that supports WebGL means that “users don’t need to download or install any additional plugins to view 3d content”. 3d models are now viewable on the Internet and we are able to generate a model, modify it and design it on the cloud. Have a look at shapesmith, 3dtin or tinkercad.

Daniel’s article points out some interesting examples of cad applications that we can find on the cloud computing context. Looking through those examples I found CloudScad.

CloudSCAD is now Open Source and available on GitHub. This does not mean that I am abandoning it. If anything I’m in a position now where I’ll probably have more time to work on it. However, after the success of splitting off Thingiview from CloudSCAD and all the great feedback and development that has happened as a result of open sourcing Thingiview, it seems like the best plan. Developers: take a look at the TODO list if you’d like to help out! CloudSCAD is pretty simple at the moment, but I believe it has great potential. Now everyone can help make it awesome!

At CloudsCAD’s blog we have this video about personal production. The video was created by nueve ojos for the “Laboratori de Fabricació” exhibtion at Disseny HUB Barcelona museum on june 2010.

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.
We can find more information about personal production in this video-lecture Online Interactive Design and Customization at DHUB. The lecture is about two projects regarding integration of digital technologies into art and craft practices: fluid-forms and automake.
This is just a little introduction of a very interesting topic that needs more than one little post, so I suppose we will be back to this soon. At present I only have questions to answer: Will WebGL CAD software be used in the future? Would we be able to design architectures trough these technologies?
Sources: nzarchitecture, CloudSCAD, Disseny Hub Barcelona.
This post is by Sara Alvarellos, our first guest editor for complexitys.
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in communication and web 2.0, actually introducing herself on OpenSource software for design.
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