Next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape | Hacker News Reader

Next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape

phys.org

30 pointsrbanffy21 comments

There used to be a column inside thew back page of the New Scientist, featuring inventions of "my friend Daedalus".

One of his inventions was to use plant tropins to regulate the growth of tree tissue, so that the trees grow in the shape of furniture.

Another of Daedalus's schemes was to focus two beams of ultraviolet laser light at the same point in the air, the frequencies of the two lasers chosen to interfere at a resonant frequency of nitrogen or oxygen, causing the gas to emit light. Suggested use: cable-free overhead street lighting.

That second one would make a nice 3d display.

Are tunable uv lasers a thing?

It's always lodged in my mind, that one. It sounds plausible, but if it were actually possible presumably someone would have patented it.

Oh - except, Daedalus is prior art!

Could you do that? Could you get two lasers to interfere at a frequency that excites Oxygen, so that if you intersect the beams it emits visible light?

I imagine Oxygen emission light would be bluish, right? So you could get a bluish 3d display in principle, with scanned 3d UV lasers. I suppose you could get a richer gamut, but you might have to inject some more interesting elements into the display gas.

Also, this 3d display wouldn't be suitable for close-up viewing; I'm not sure I'd want to risk getting too close to a battery of scanned UV lasers.

You might do it in a tank full of the easiest gas possible. A fishtank full of neon or something.

IKEA has been shipping flat chairs for several decades. I guess we can shortcut the tedious assembly process by watering our chairs instead. Sounds like a solution in search of a problem?

I think this is really cool tech, but it is a huge stretch to suggest this can be used to produce furniture. I wish the article focused on more reasonable, small-scale use cases.

I was thinking the same thing.

The material looks like it has the consistency of dijon mustard. To make a chair, you'd need to be able to have bridges, which that material couldn't do. Even if you could, how could you collapse it for packing?

Of course, even if you did decide to focus on small-scale use cases, does the savings in shipping costs due to smaller packaging offset the higher expense in manufacturing? And is it food safe?

It's a cool tech, but I'm just having a hard time figuring out how it could be useful compared to current tech.

This is a super cool article and all the notes so far are incredibly literal takes on how this can't be immediately commercialized to revolutionize the furniture industry. I love hearing about interesting processes and research like this.

I mean - the research itself is cool.

What's less cool is forcing it into a clickbait title that has almost no relevance to the research at hand.

I would have been fascinated at a title like "Controllable warping in 3d printed materials". That alone is awesome - why fuck around with the useless "wooden chair" bs?

Yeah, it's just interesting research. We can make chairs pretty well at this stage too via lots of different methods. For example, steam bending is pretty common as a technique and isn't that revolutionary.

So when humidity rises, the chair goes flat again?

Typically when wood warps it doesn’t un-warp on its own when the humidity changes again so I would guess not. Although from TFA it looks like they’re investigating reversibility:

> The team is also exploring whether the morphing process could be made reversible.

So you water your chair and stuff it back into the case for portability?

What a brave new world...

Quick edit: I'm envisioning some solid prank material around the pool now

Considering that the water would add a significant amount of weight, a chair that works in reverse would be kind of interesting: Arrives as a flat, light piece and once you placed it in the room you need it, you sprinkle it with water to make it unfold.

Might even help against back-issues for office workers as they'll have to interrupt their work to re-moisten their seats every so often.

moist and seat are two words I never want in the same sentence.

I've never had a leather chair in the summer before and there are times I regret the decision.

IMO, leather is a bug, not a feature. The ONLY advantage it has over cloth is that it's easier to clean.

Leather is less comfortable, and in a chair, comfort is the top priority, followed by durability, which leather also loses to as it starts to crack and wrinkle over time.

Depends on how much water. If it was designed to fold into a chair shape when exposed to normal room humidity, you'd remove it from the hermetically sealed bag and it'd spontaneously (over, I assume, many hours) fold itself into the intended shape.

"normal room humidity" is extremely variable.

There is certainly a range that can be considered "normal" however broad.

the Eames did a lot of cool experiments with plywood - this was a broken leg splint that was sold to the US military during WW2

https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/molded-plywood-leg-spli...

the "kazam!" machine that made it:

https://www.vitra.com/en-fr/magazine/details/the-kazam-machi...

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