CHAPTER 3 — The Future of Modeling

Future shocked

As it turned out, the future was about travel. Not by way of jets and rockets, but by way of a virtual environment. The “used futures” of narratives like Blade Runner were a tad closer to our reality, in that they consider the interface of man and machine that we are on the threshold of witnessing. But the future isn’t what it used to be. And it’s not as far away as it used to be.

In 1968, Archigram member Peter Cook envisioned the Info Gonk, preceding goggles-and-glove virtual reality environments by about 30 years. But the interactive user interface design in Minority Report, a movie set in 2050, couldn’t anticipate change quickly enough. Minority-Report-like interfaces based on 3D geometries are starting to crop up at trade shows about 35 years too early! What does this tell us about the rates of technological change and the ability of futurists to keep up?

Interactive user interface in Minority Report, 2002

Intel’s interactive user interface at CES 2009 — a decade and a half ago!

Despite the dangers of indulging in futurism, let’s go out on a limb and speculate a bit about the role 3D digital modeling will play in the future of our creative work.

“Magic” technologies

The expanded universe of the Star Trek franchise can sometimes feel like a galaxy of techno-babbling, do-gooding Boy Scouts run amok. However, three seemingly “magic” technologies present therein are of interest to 3D modelers: the replicator, the transporter, and the holodeck. All work with a requirement of rendering objects in 3D space. And each embodies a fundamental convergence of digital data with tactile experience which will be the next great leap forward in the digital revolution: the post-computer age, wherein computing technologies will become effectively invisible as they become embedded in the non-digital world.

The Replicator

The replicator has been around since the first episode of Star Trek, but Captain Picard’s “Earl Grey tea, hot” command epitomizes the ease with which replicator technology responds to a user’s nutritional needs. The seeds of any future replicator device are found in the RepRap Project initiated by Adrian Bowyer, and the molecular assembler that researchers in nanotechnology are working on.

Adrian Bowyer, RepRap Project

Lizard Fire Studios, Productive Nanosystems

The Transporter

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, included a transporter device as a special-effects cost-saving device after seeing the idea in the 1958 movie The Fly. In the 1986 David Cronenberg remake, Jeff Goldblum deals with the consequences of inattention to detail. His DNA gets crossed with that of a fly that goes along for the ride in his transporter in a cautionary tale about technological hubris.

Of all the “magic” Trek technologies, the transporter may seem to be the most far-fetched. However, teleportation of 3D objects may be an idea that’s just around the corner. Information was transferred from one quantum particle to another in 1997 by a team led by Anton Zeilinger. In February of 2010, it was reported by MIT’s Technology Review blog that Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan had outlined a discovery that allows energy to be teleported. Meanwhile, scientists in China created a quantum teleportation of over 10 miles. While this was for a very minuscule mass, it was certainly a far enough distance to make contact with an orbiting satellite.

Interview with Michio Kaku on quantum teleportation

Among other variables, a viable larger-scale teleport device will require in the data it manipulates are the elementary coordinates of particles in XYZ space. That’s lots more data than you handle in any current modeling program!

The Holodeck

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the revival show of Roddenberry’s franchise, a new technology plot element was unveiled. The holodeck was a simulated reality environment where people, things, and events are “created” using a multimedia combination of replicated matter, holograms, force fields, speakers for sound, and so on. The virtual reality experience will evolve into holodeck-like environments based on such current technologies as the CAVE and the VirtuSphere below.

Holographic environments are an important 3D aspect of the holodeck which current technology is on the verge of deploying, as you can read about in the link.

Electronic ink, electronic mass

Consider the immediate applications in a 3D material context: wallpapers, clothing, a textile for furnishings, or sculptural surface material. Now consider an extrapolation to some future idea: since the dark and light states of e-ink develop figure-ground relationships like any other graphic context, and states of mass and void in 3D are analogous to states of figure and ground, what kind of technology would create an e-mass that can change with electronic polarity as easy as e-ink? Sounds implausible? So did e-ink not too long ago.

Daniel Rozin,  Wooden Mirror, 1999

But e-mass is closer than you think. Artist Daniel Rozin created a wooden pixel mirror that uses bas-relief — a small change in depth — to create a virtual reflection, way back in 1999. In a more dramatic change of depth, ART+COM metaphorically interpreted the process of vehicle form design into the kinetic sculpture seen here.

ART+COM,  Kinetic Sculpture for the BMW Museum, 2008

Fabbing in the studio

Rozin and ART+COM represent a growing number of artists embracing digital form-making. Digital fabrication, sometimes known as rapid prototyping, has been around for some time now but has always been financially prohibitive—until now. The Rep-Rap Project referenced earlier, along with initiatives like the Prusa printers we use in our maker space, is doing for 3D printing what Apple did for computing in the 1980s: making it accessible to most people, including artists.

Other forms of fabrication, laser and water-jet cutting, milling, and the like, are becoming more accessible through initiatives like 3DSystems Quickparts service or Thingiverse. Artists and hackers are coming together in hacker spaces and maker spaces like Philadelphia’s NextFab, membership communities that share resources to gain access to digital fabrication and electronics. These communities are eroding the boundaries among artists, designers, hackers, and electronics buffs — what Paul Graham generally refers to as makers.

Printing a building instead of a blueprint

Although not as exotic as the speculative idea of a shape-shifting e-mass above, the idea of “printing” a building — really just 3D printing on a scale larger than Kapoor’s sculpture — is another idea whose time has almost arrived. Read here about the world’s first printed building.

Another kind of “printing” idea comes out of extruding concrete and building up a volume akin to a high-tech version of a coil-built ceramic vessel. Variations are seen here.

3D Printing Robotic Arm on a Track in Action at Vertico

Paging Dr. Fab

Architects sometimes refer to their buildings as metaphors for the human body.

So if you can print a building, why not a body? Here we illustrate another use for 3D technology that is right around the bend.

Organ Printing

The wave crashes

That’s as far as I’ll take a stab at being a futurist. With the pace of change being what it is (and still accelerating), I imagine this title will be edited more often than any other. The future isn’t what it used to be because it used to be the future. Rates of technological obsolescence make for an ever-diminishing half-life for the futurists’ game. Here’s an example: a timeline representing the rates of change for major market musical recording technology since Edison’s experiments with cylinder recording:

What this illustrates is how potentially alienating the rates of technological progress can be, even to those who wholeheartedly embrace it. When the wave crashes — that is, when technology chases itself out of existence so fast that we can’t absorb the change — it should come as no surprise that the narrative device of anachronism becomes as popular as it currently is in modern storytelling.

Indistinguishable from magic

An anachronism is something out of place with its time: an aerosol spray paint can at Lascaux, say, making easy work of painting oxen on the cave wall. Many narrative genres indulge in it. However, steampunk is a genre that revels in temporally displaced technologies, typically from the future into the past — a kind of science fiction in reverse. The essence of our time is steampunk, and the genre becomes a mirror in which we can see how we live with anachronism in our daily lives. The forward-flung technologies we explored above are right at our doorstep, making it feel like we missed the process that led to the future.

Although a term not coined until the late 1980s, steampunk has precedents dating back to Jules Verne. And it continues up through novelists with as serious a set of literary chops as Thomas Pynchon. In Against the Day, Pynchon shuttles back and forth in narrative time and with technologies that seem at once plausible and absurd — magic, if you will. But if we looked at what is done today with technology through the eyes of a person from a century ago, our age would seem magic. After all, as science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke has said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Synthesis

Without being too specific — oh, that fatal trap for any futurist — we can predict the magic we’ll encounter in the next decades will be a fusion, analogous to the anachronisms of Pynchon. He dissolved the boundaries of history and speculative fiction. So too we will see the dissolution of boundaries between the present and the future. This will occur largely through a synthesis of the digital and the tactile. The interactive interface we know today will become as quaint as a gramophone. Our houses, our clothes, our bodies — and our art — will become “smart.” The digital, embedded in the tactile, will become invisible. In that post-computer, invisibly digital age, technology will indeed be indistinguishable from magic.

Imagine, in that future, the interesting challenge of being an artist. Visit the Future Timeline and see if you can determine the astonishing number of times when 3D digital technologies play a role.