Something I have been messing around with for a while in the computer, but a couple of weeks ago I was able to mock it up. The idea is a screen wall that would have a flexible “louver.” The basic unit is a clip. As the clip rotates the louver rotates with it. The video above shows the clip and how the louver would be controlled by multiple clips.
The openness/rotation of the louvers is controlled topographically by a surface. You can see how this works in the video above. The louvers could be controlled by the displacement of an image or by simply deforming the surface.
The model includes all of the tooling needed to produce the ribs+clips with a laser cutter. In that sense the unit in Maya is not just representational, but contains all of the lines and tolerances need for production. We are proposing this for an office renovation that we are currently working on in the studio. The tooling will of course change and the structure will become a composite of CNC cut ribs/columns and laser cut clips. We hope it happens, it will be exciting to produce a completely tooled/labeled model. It would be great to not have to make any drawings. You can check out the model that was used for laser cutting below.
Source: screen.mb
