Sketching Dynamic Geometry

Not Grasshopper, but I thought this recent work by Daniel Belcher would probably be of interest to many here:

http://www.db-rep.net/designtech/hci/sketching-dynamic-geometry/

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by djordje on November 8, 2012 at 1:59pm

Looks very nice.
Thank you for posting the link.

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on November 8, 2012 at 6:11pm

Nice find. This will be cool. It actually reminds me alot of the GRaIL (Graphical Input Langauge) developed back in 1968). Here's a video of Alan Kay presenting this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM&feature=related

Permalink Reply by djordje on November 8, 2012 at 6:45pm

Wow !!!
I can't believe something like this existed in 1968
:O

Permalink Reply by Andrew Kudless on November 8, 2012 at 10:15pm

Wow! Very Nice. it looks like Daniel Belcher is located in Seattle (doing great work at LMN). Let's hope that McNeel (also in Seattle) is closely watching this and collaborates with him on this project or others. The Mac version of Rhino is a waste of time and needs something like this. The UI of Rhino OSX feels like it is stuck in 1995 when it should be closer to the Daniel's project.

Permalink Reply by 0wy5knxk8vaaa on November 12, 2012 at 4:22pm

Daniel, djordje, Andy, Andrew-

Thanks for the interest! GRaIL is (almost) as cool as SketchPad. It's really hard to believe that all this stuff was going on back in the 1960s...very glad that both Alan Kay and Ivan Sutherland are still doing insanely great work.

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on November 13, 2012 at 4:04am

I was amazed when I discovered that in Sutherland's thesis about Sketchpad he even used the constraint relaxation procedure for quick approximate structural analysis:

Permalink Reply by 0wy5knxk8vaaa on November 13, 2012 at 9:53am

Eerie isn't it? So awesome.

A few years back, I saw Ivan Sutherland speak at a University of Washington CSE/EE on Fleet, Infinity & Marina. It's a shame the video in the link doesn't include the Q&A. Many of the questions related to how you would program for Fleet. Sutherland admits that they have found it difficult. I'm paraphrasing, but he talks about how we are not used to thinking concurrently. You could hear the gasp from the crowd when he said (something to the effect of): programming will probably look and feel very different than it does today. Word.

I've been doing a fair bit of shader programming lately in GLSL and I know that I find thinking concurrently to be pretty damn hard.

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on November 13, 2012 at 4:31am