Kinergy

Quick Info

Project Date Feb. 1, 2020 - April 30, 2022
PIs: Jon E. Froehlich (PI)
Keywords: 3d printing, fabrication, kinetic fabrication, 3d-printable motion

News

Makeability Lab at UIST'22

Nov 02, 2022 | Jon

Congratulations to Liang He and Jaewook Lee for presenting work at UIST'22 in Bend, Oregon—the premier publication venue in technical HCI and systems-driven HCI work. Liang presented on Kinergy, an interactive design tool for creating self-propelled motion by harniessing the energy stored in 3D printable springs, which represents ~2 years of research and development (and builds on our prior work Ondule). He, L., Su, X., Peng, H., Lipton, J. I., Froehlich, J. E. (2022). Kinergy: Creating 3D Printable Motion using Embedded Kinetic Energy. Proceedings of UIST 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545636 Jae presented RemoteLab, a VR toolkit for Unity designed to facilitate the preparation of remote experiments by providing a set of tools that synchronize experiment state across multiple computers, record and collect data from various multimedia sources, and replay the accumulated data for analysis. Jaewook Lee, Raahul Natarrajan, Sebastian S. Rodriguez, Payod Panda, and Eyal Ofek. 2022. RemoteLab: A VR Remote Study Toolkit. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 51, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545679

Liang He Passes General Exam

Dec 18, 2020 | Jon

Announcing Liang He, PhD Candidate! Liang He successfully passed his General Exam entitled Interactive Design Tools and Techniques for Augmented 3D Printable Behaviors. His talk and accompanying slides were beautifully designed and thoughtfully captured his vision for enabling designers and DIY makers to more easily prototype and fabricate interactive 3D printable forms. Congrats Liang!

About

Kinergy Interface

Kinergy provides an easy-to-use interface to enable users embed 3D printable motions into their selected models.

We present Kinergy—an interactive design tool for creating self propelled motion by harnessing the energy stored in 3D printable springs. To produce controllable output motions, we introduce 3D printable kinetic units, a set of parameterizable designs that encapsulate 3D printable springs, compliant locks, and transmission mechanisms for three non-periodic motions—instant translation, instant rotation, continuous translation—and four periodic motions— continuous rotation, reciprocation, oscillation, intermittent rotation. Kinergy allows the user to create motion-enabled 3D models by embedding kinetic units, customize output motion characteristics by parameterizing embedded springs and kinematic elements, control energy by operating the specialized lock, and preview the resulting motion in an interactive environment. We demonstrate the potential of our techniques via example applications from spring loaded cars to kinetic sculptures and close with a discussion of key challenges such as geometric constraints.