Introduction

In this phase of the project, we aimed at creating a design system that incorporates the act of punching with the act of 3D mesh modeling.  In that, the user would then be able to export the mesh to have it fabricated through some means of 3D printing.  Skeleton data from an Xbox Kinect was used to track hand positions in a 3D space and measure when, where, and to what degree a fist intersected a mesh plane.  The Kinect data was captured using Firefly in Grasshopper, then transformed and stored to produce a transformation in the mesh.

The Theory

The theory behind our conceit was to take a completely immaterial process and bring some of it into the real world.  This involved processing raw hand location data and augmenting that with the 3D environment in (for our case) Rhino and Grasshopper.  Though our original idea took from the idea of punching and "denting" a virtual object, the outcome of our project focused more on shaping the mesh simply using your hand's, which turned out to be a much less aggressive process.