Thursday, September 17, 2015

Making Mountains into Couches

This is very much in the category of semi-useless but a lot of fun.  

Near my home town of Cordova, there is a mountain named Queen's Chair and loosely speaking it looks like a chair.  For years I have wondered, how comfortable would this mountain be if it was transformed into an actual chair and more importantly could an industry be made around making mountains into chair designs.  I would love for a company or service provider, allow me to choose a series of topological features, mountains, islands, canyons, and asteroids, and turn them into puffy memory foam furniture for homes, education spaces, and offices.  The big challenges for making these chairs is not the basic foam, CNC foam cutting machines should be reasonable, the real challenge is making the foam deform, when sat in, such that the foam becomes something the reasonable approximation of a comfortable seat.  The next challenge is the cover, simple two dimensional sheets are not going to look right, you need the cover for the couch that contours to the shape of the structure, so a manufacturing technique that allows dynamically producing covers that fit the mountain. 

Imagine in 20 years where various rapid prototyping technologies have lowered the barrier of entry to a "reasonable" cost how cool museums and visitor centers could be.  One could imagine the visitors center at the Grand Canyon, where children and adults can play in a miniature canyon with very little risk of injury as they bump into everything.  Or an office of some eccentric with their miniature Everest that they "ascend" every morning before sitting on the peak, allowing them to relive their glorious expedition where they were carried to the peak.


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