I admit it, I am a 3D printing fanboy. I have a Makerbot at home (it’s my second one). I see great potential in what Bre Pettis and the team are doing, both with the concept of open source hardware and in pushing the adoption and progression of the entire industry by making it accessible to more people than ever before. As part of that effort, Bre was actually featured on the Colbert Report recently, in this great interview.
In a way I feel like we have a similar mission at daqri, except instead of physcial 3D objects we are proliferating and creating accessibility to virtual 3D objects and images. Virtual objects and images can be extremely useful where there’s a need for visualization, for instance in urban planning, architecture, entertainment, marketing, education, and the manufacturing process. We think that AR is one of the most important mediums for communicating ideas, and we want to encourage adoption and improve the technology by making it accessible to as many people as possible.
What does this have to do with the the guys at Makerbot? Well, as a customer, I occasionally hit up thingiverse.com where users share their 3D models. Recently I was there looking for some .stl format 3D models to try out with daqri and I came accross a user submitted 3D model of the makerbot. It was a Google sketchup file, so I converted it to .obj, uploaded it to a daqri code, and a few short minutes later I give you the “Make-AR-bot”:
That’s my thing-a-matic next to the AR version.
Here’s a link to the daqri page associated with the Make-AR-bot, so you can download the QR code and try it out yourself.
http://daqri.com/R9EX1mp7Adm
_Brian
