The MX3D team first showed the smart bridge to the public back in October 2018 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. I was there with the team to finish and test features such as realtime display of skeletons detected using computer vision. Here’s a reminder of how that went:
An interesting aspect of the public’s response to the bridge at DDW2018 was that it had broad appeal to people but that people appreciated different aspects of the project:
- The majority view: “wow, what a cool-looking bridge!”
- Those who dug a little deeper: “it was 3D-printed by robots? Interesting – I wonder how or when this will become viable as a construction technique.”
- A few folk who really got the nuances of the project: “this is the future of smart infrastructure: one day cities will function on the data that objects like this will generate.”
If I had to guess at the distribution between these groups, it’d probably be 70-25-5. I could be totally off with this guesstimate, but hopefully it…