Campus party is the biggest technology event in the world, it is sort of an oversized LAN-party with more than 6000 geeks. Besides sitting in front of your computer and playing games you can also attend some workshops and listen to various speakers. The Campus Party was held in one of the beautiful buildings from ‘Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias ‘ (city of arts and sciences).

The part of Campus Party where the interactive installations were shown was the ‘Campus Futuro‘ section, there were some other cool interactive projects like the Wiispray, Move and some robots. The entry was free to this section so a lot of people entered.

The building was open from 10:00 till 21:00 seven days a week. It was a good test case to see how Gyro worked under these ‘extreme’ conditions. Although it still is a prototype, it worked quite well and was easy to fix the problems which occurred.
It was a great week and I’am full of ideas and improvements for the next version of Gyro.

What is it used for
Most people are using 3D printing for fun or for prototyping. You are able to make almost every object that you can think of. It’s even possible to make objects which are not produce-able with ordinary production methods like shapes inside a bigger shape.

Gyro project
For my Gyro project I used a 3D printer for a plastic part that you can click on top of a Powerball. This part hold the sensor which measures the speed.


I used Cinema 4D (C4D) to build the object, Cinema 4D is probably not the best tool to do 3D modeling for 3D printers, there are better (CAD) tools which have more precise measurement tools like Solid Work. C4D is a very user friendly program and it runs on PC and Mac. I exported the file as a collada file from C4D. I opened the file in Meshlab to check for errors like inverted normals and holes, from Meshlab I exported the object as a STL file, and uploaded it to Shapeways.

There are some different places were you can print your 3D models, all around the world (also in Amsterdam) there are Fablabs where you can use a 3D printer to print out your models. You can also upload your file to an online 3D printing company and they will print your models. My objects were printed at ‘Shapeways‘. Although it is a Dutch company, you pay in US dollars and worldwide shipping is included if you order has a minimum of $25,-.

At Shapeways there are some different materials which you can choose, like black, white and transparent. All the materials are not as smooth as normal plastic, that’s a characteristic of 3D printers. I used very fine sandpaper to smooth-en the plastic part. Sandpapering works, but there are always parts you can’t sandpaper, because it is impossible to reach.

I think 3D printing is great for prototyping and I am certainly going to use it in some future projects.

The Hot100 are the most talented, newly introduced, most passionated and promising up-and-coming creative media talent.
According to the: Virtueel Platform

During Picnic’08 there was a special day for all the ‘hot’ people.
I presented my Gyro project, and tried to give a practical demo within 3 minutes.

The Golden Dot is a yearly showcase and award ceremony for excellent student projects from the Institute for Interactive Media at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam.
This year, the Golden Dot will take place at Hotel Arena in Amsterdam, on 10 June 2008. In the afternoon, fourteen projects will be pitched before an official jury. That evening, the award ceremony will take place, hosted by Dennis Weening, Mtv Europe.
from: networkcultures.org

Although there was not much competition in the graduation year, the Gyro project has won a ‘Golden Dot’ in the category ‘graduation project’.
I think the Gyro project was a nice and fun project to present and it was certainly something different than ‘a website’. It has struck me that there where quite a lot of presentations which were almost the same.