This. It gives me an indescribable amount of pleasure that the kinect has turned out to be so utterly worthless for gaming, but world-changing as a piece of mass-produced technology.
You can get home FDM printers for like 0 now. http://printrbot.com
Building this rig for home use and small objects would probably just need a Kinect (which can be had very cheaply), a linear actuator with controller (pretty cheap), and a fishtank (really cheap).
I'm not sure whether to applaud them for using an analog computer to do the heavy lifting or laugh at them. Either way it's a bit of a punt for the computational sciences dept, don't you think?
Where in the paper/presentation do they say it's an analog computer? I skimmed the paper and I just saw that they were using a simplified/limited version of Navier-Stokes, which I suppose could be done easily enough on an analog computer but there's nothing particularly compelling about doing it that way AFAIK (and the word "analog" never turns up in the paper anyway).
Well I didn't read the paper, and probably should have. I just assumed they were using the dipping tank to read the distortion off the dipped object. As you say, it is in fact a computational technique. So bully for them.
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