Looking beyond 3D printing

A  team of engineers at Autodesk in the United States have been pushing the limits of conventional 3D printing — not by redesigning the machines themselves but by creating a network to harness their collective power.

Autodesk’s Project Escher is a new printing system that utilises the power of several 3D printers at once to fabricate complex parts in unison, say media reports. The new system can increase production speed by up to 90%.

While the benefits of 3D printing are undeniable, its lengthy process has impeded it from being rolled out in large-scale additive manufacturing. Designers in industries such as automotive, aerospace and construction want to utilise the power of 3D printing to form complex geometries, but as the printing is measured in weight per hour, large objects can take considerable amounts of time.

Project Escher uses a gantry system with suspended 3D printing ‘bots’, selectively assigning a part of the model to each, producing a fully assembled final object. Autodesk is still developing Project Escher in house, with the vision to start enlisting companies to experiment with their own processes in the near future.
Achal Narayanan

Gliding through

A new attraction in the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, the tallest building in the state of California, is the Skyslide, which is now open to the public. A glass slide suspended 1,000 feet (305 metres) above downtown Los Angeles, the Skyslide begins on the 70th floor of the building and extends 45 feet (15 metres) down to the 69th floor.

The adrenalin-inducing ride lasts only a few seconds, but promises a thrill as passengers glide down on a mat with nothing but 1.5-inch-thick glass separating them from the city
below. The slide is one of the building’s many new features open to the public at the area now known as the SkySpace. At the end of the slide is an open-air observation deck — the largest in the city — with 360-degree views of Los Angeles.

The US Bank Tower — formerly known as Library Tower and First Interstate Bank World Center — is a 1,018-foot skyscraper in Los Angeles. Besides being the tallest building in California, it is also the tallest structure west of the Mississippi River. In 2013, Singapore-based hotel and property developer OUE acquired the building and began planning new ways to attract people other than office workers into the space.
Work on the open-air deck and slide began in 2014 and cost nearly $31 million.
 Geetha Balachandran