Low-Fab (low-fidelity fabrication) has allowed designers to speed up the initial prototyping of 3D objects. However, the method is used to quickly verify the key aspects of the model, and are not the final desired object. Therefore, the object generated by Low-Fab are temporal objects in which the disposability and/or reusability of the material should be considered. Here we present a novel prototyping method beyond the concept of Low-Fab, to quickly fabricate large, disposable, reusable and edible objects by using fluffed sugar for the material. We have implemented a fabrication system that supports the user to create desired objects in high-speed, which is based on the idea of cotton candy making. Our idea is to combine food fabrication techniques with rapid prototyping methods, which we believe that it can contribute to both designers and gastronomy.

Example Prototypes created with Flufy. (a) A hat. (b) A bird. (c) Creating wearable and fashionable objects, e,g., a scarf. (d) The object can stick to other objects, e.g., a key holder on the wall.

Publication

Natsuki Hamanishi*, Michinari Kono*, Shunichi Suwa, Takashi Miyaki, and Jun Rekimoto. 2018. Flufy: Recyclable and Edible Rapid Prototyping using Fluffed Sugar. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion (IUI ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 27, 2 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3180308.3180335 (Peer Review, Demo)
* Contributed Equally