Eddy Sykes’ Yakuza Lou is a site-specific installation that uses the relationship between the natural and mechanical notions of landscape, to create a unique garden with pushing and folding topographic surfaces and a robot cloud that floats overhead creating a volume in constant pseudo-natural flux.
This fusion of natural and man-made elements into a carefully thought-out practical application allows viewers to re-evaluate advanced systems of design.
This multi-system consists of a self-articulating, undulating landscape that utilizes hydrodynamics, motors, and growth patterns to constantly redefine a system of octagonal vegetative mats. Aided by a hinge-mounted motor, each octagonal palette expands and contracts much like an origami, fortune-telling toy. The opened shape promises to be a beautiful three-dimensional grass floret. The landscape coexists with an artificial Cumulonimbus cloud, which hovers overhead and transforms over time.
VisBox-X3 modules can be arranged in a variety of surround screen configurations, including a flat wall, a faceted theater, or an immersive room. A front-projected floor module is also available for increased immersion.
In addition to being reconfigurable, a system made up of VisBox-X3 modules is easily expandable. Additional units can be purchased and added to the system as needed.
MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic and his team of researchers behind the latest wireless electricity scheme have demoed their magnetically coupled resonator technology on a 60-watt lightbulb that wasn’t plugged in. This new technology is called WiTricity. WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects.
Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. “The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations,” Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.
The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.
Designers at Hofman Dujardin Architects have created the Bloomframe. Bloomframe is a window frame that can be transformed into a balcony. Designed by Amsterdam-based Hofman Dujardin Architects, the Bloomframe balcony offers a flexible living environment by making it possible to extend the domain of one’s facade. In this way, the dynamic balcony enables adding outdoor space to compact apartments in urban high-rise areas.
The Bloomframe balcony can be operated automatically in one movement and with one control. The system includes provisions to guarantee collapse safety during opening and closing, and the drive consists of an rpm-controlled electric motor that operates the balcony at two points via an auto-braking reduction (drop safety). The movement is transferred by tie rods from these linear guides. The fully open position is limited mechanically, which guarantees optimum safety of the converted balcony. The application of a combined powered / mechanical movement makes the system user-friendly and easy to open and close for everyone.
Tronic Studio has recently completed an ad for General Electric entitles “Building Dreams”. This video uses a motif of building objects and environments out of self similar parts . A viewer moves through an entire landscape that builds itself out of these parts.
Implant Matrix is an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future. A network of mechanisms reacts to human occupants as erotic prey. The structure responds to human presence with subtle grasping and sucking motions, ingesting organic materials and incorporating them into a new hybrid entity.
Implant Matrix is composed of interlinking filtering ‘pore’ within a lightweight structural system. Primitive interactive systems employ capacitance sensors, shape-memory alloy wire actuators and distributed microprocessors. The matrix is fabricated by laser cutting direct from digital models. Implant Matrix was installed at the InterAccess Media Arts Centre in Toronto.
Utility Fog is a hypotehtical collection of tiny robots, envisioned by Dr. John Storrs Hall while he was thinking about a nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts. The robots would be microscopic, with extending arms reaching in several different directions, and could perform lattice reconfiguration. Grabbers at the ends of the arms would allow the robots (or foglets) to mechanically link to one another and share both information and energy, enabling them to act as a continuous substance with mechanical and optical properties that could be varied over a wide range. Each foglet would have substantial computing power, and would be able to communicate with its neighbors.
While the foglets would be micro-scale, construction of the foglets would require full molecular nanotechnology. Each bot would be in the shape of a dodecahedron with 12 arms extending outwards. Each arm would have 4 degrees of freedom. When linked together the foglets would form an octet truss. The foglets’ bodies would be made of aluminum oxide rather than combustible diamond to avoid creating a fuel air explosive.
The main idea behind this project was to develop a series of self-similar nested shapes that have the ability to be reprogrammed by the user post-production to accommodate changing demands. To accomplish this task in architectural terms he developed an entire palette of robots (materials, interactivity, and mechanical) that come together at specific instances to achieve a desired geometry.
The scale of the module was extremely important. With technology getting smaller and smaller (nano scale) this project envisioned that these objects would be the size of a fingernail and have the ability to change location. Self similar modules could make new physical connections and move around each other based on connections of self-similar parts.
Spatial Robots, created by Miles Kemp in 2007, is a website dedicated to cataloging, discussing and promoting interactive spatial systems, user interfaces and emerging technology in architecture.
