Well, I’ve just ordered a new drafting table, this one with the latest giant tablet table, along with a fairly powerful computer that rests in the cradle below. Surely you say that it is an expensive business furniture, but life has changed and with it the office of the designer and the furniture, I suppose. Nowadays, if you can’t show the concept representation of your project in a 3-D model, real or one and zero, then chances are good that someone won’t give a damn, regardless of your brilliance or original thought of genius. creative. Okay, let’s talk for a moment about the designer’s dilemma.

Why do my prototype designs, whether they be unmanned robotic underwater vehicles, micro air vehicles, or new component innovation, always look so different in the real world than they do on my drawing board or inside a 3-D CADCAM rendering? Well, actually there are many reasons, but more importantly, what can we do about it in the future? Yes, a very hundred question indeed. And perhaps we would like to consider this perplexing and well-known problem.

There is an excellent article that you would like to read, which addresses this issue from an architectural point of view; “Architectural Design Through Computational Media,” by Mark John Sich, released May 9, 1997. In his summary, he asks some dubious questions, one that every designer, engineer, architect, or conceptual thinker should consider when creating their CADCAM 3 – D computer renderings or even a full-scale model of your innovation, whatever. Mark asks;

1. How can an architect’s sensitivity to physicality be integrated into computational modeling and rendering?

2. What are the inherent differences between real physical models and computational models?

3. What is lost and what is gained, and can they reconcile with each other?

The researcher suggests and proposes the creation of an immersive tool that will allow the phenomenological creation of a virtual model.

Okay, he wrote about this in 1997 and it was obviously a problem before then, but even more so today as people expect the finished product to be exactly as they envisioned it or saw it on the computer, video presentation on DVD, or on the old blueprint 2-D artist’s rendering, patent application image, or even on a website, right? I mean we see it, we want it, but then when we have it in our warm little hands (personal technology device) or walk through it (architectural creation) here in the real world, well, it’s nothing like we expected.

Sure, we have issues with unrealistic photo buys and other unrealistic landscape modeling strategies with fully grown bushes, but it’s actually more than that, we all know it is, at least if you’re a designer, like me, for sure as Hell do. So what’s the next step? Well, we are approaching the next 3D holographic reality, and we have 3D printers that can make architectural models in 24 hours instead of weeks of staff work. But playing god in a 1:100 scale 3-D model, or HO size model, isn’t the same as walking through the damn thing, down hallways and hallways.

Imagine being at a City Planning Commission meeting, turning on the holographic display, and allowing each guest to walk through the building, or get up close and personal with the component or device. Yes, that’s what it takes, and perhaps that’s why Google Earth has moved indoors, mapping the interior of public buildings with its “street view” strategies. I’d like you to think about this for a few moments and then maybe we should take this conversation to a much higher level, you can email me.