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Reverb
Reverb Video Documentation

REVERB is a project by new media artist and robot tamer Madeline Gannon that bridges the virtual and physical contexts of fabrication and wearable design.

This 3D modeling environment allows the artist or designer to guide the movement of a 3D asset across the curvature of the body, leaving a digital trace that is then 3D printed and transformed into wearable jewelry. The gestures of the artist’s hand are what the 3D asset uses as a guiding path as it leaves it’s trace. Madeline refers to this method as a sort of digital chronomorphology, an offshoot of chronophotography- which is a composite recording of an object’s movement.

The pipeline of Madeline’s chronomorphological process begins with a depth sensor (e.g. Kinect) that records the depth data of the person who will be fitted for the wearable model. A point cloud is then generated and imported into a 3D workspace. Once positioned in there, the same depth sensor will detect the motion of the artist’s hands as they move around, forming the path on which a small 3D asset moves. Finally, the generated chronomorphological 3D model is printed and worn by the person.

Reverb is one of Madeline’s most famous and reputed pieces, covered by virtually every important technology magazine and conference in America. Other successful works include Mimus, a whimsical robot with childlike wonder and curiosity for other humans, as well as Tactum, another exploration in 3D printed wearables that could be custom fit and distributed online. While her education background is predominantly in architecture, she has studied computational design, art and robotics in more recent years. She is currently attending Carnegie Mellon and will be graduating in May with a PhD in computational design.