Hello there!
Thank you to all our first backers who brought this project to over $1500 and 10% of our goal in just the first week!
To keep the momentum going, I'll be posting updates on the project and we work on it. I'll strive to make them interesting and full of pictures of triangulated goodness.
Also, some more details about Continuum...
Continuum was initially my thesis from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). D.dress was built on Processing and the Toxiclibs library.
The current version of D.dress online is completely rewritten in javascript using the Pre3D library for canvas and some other code hackery. I'm rather proud of the saving/exporting/importing part. It's a bit slow right now, but it actually creates an .stl file via php. The rendering actually runs fast enough without WebGL, but of course that will come.
The best part about doing this project is seeing people who try the app "get it" right away. And in making a tool that lets people design something, you get far more range of interesting designs than you would ever have thought of.
This is super fun with the online app, so I have page now that lets you see all the designs people have made and saved so far:
www.continuumfashion.com/gallery.php
The implementation has a ways to go...we have to add the measurement system and better drawing controls. Also ideally there would be automatic flattening of the triangle mesh into the cutting pattern, but this is actually a tricky problem to solve, so right now I've unwrapped the meshes manually in Blender. (Have you done research on automated mesh unwrapping? Please do share!)
I am joined in this endeavor by my friend and fellow computational designer Jenna Fizel. Jenna has a background in computational architecture from MIT, and her first job was scripting algorithms for paneling crazy generative skyscrapers. We also share the same taste in fashion and obsession with rapid fabrication machines.
One day I said to her: "I want to write code to make dresses and make it dynamically fit your measurements." She said, "Yes! But can we make shoes too?"
Shoes will come...But yes, you can make things other than dresses using the same software. People have already realized you can make skirts with D.dress. You could also make a belt, or hat, or scarf. There would need to be some features added to better suit this, but the significance is that when a design becomes a piece of software, we encapsulate design as rules that can be combined with other rules determined directly by the user. It's not just design your own dress, it's design your own product line. Physical products becoming more digital, yes!
To highlight this extendability, we're featuring a large variety of triangulated designs outside of the dresses. This is also because cutting the triangles creates extra remnant triangles of fabric, so it is a good method to use the scraps for making bags and hats.
And, we can make awesome bags!
Yes, I'm sure there are questions like "what do the other reward items look like?" So we'll be getting photos up as we go.
If you have selected the dress cutting pattern, we will make you a cutting pattern from your design according to your measurements, along with adjustments to make it sewable.
This weekend Jenna and I set to making things, and now my laptop proudly proclaims that the future is indeed an awesome place. (If opt for a sticker, it comes in other colors too.) Yay plotter!
More to come...
