In 1985, the Innovative Design Fund placed an ad in Scientific American offering up to $10,000 to support clever prototypes for clothing, home decor, and textiles. William Freeman Ph.D., then an electrical engineer at Polaroid and now an MIT professor, saw it and submitted a novel idea: a three-sided zipper. Instead of fastening pants, it'd be like a switch that seamlessly flipped chairs, tents, and purses between soft and rigid states, making them easier to pack and put together.
The practical usess were pretty mind-blowing.
They were neat to loook at but not very impressive in practical terms. So you can take 3 semi-floppy coiled things and turn them into one semi-rigid thing. But only one of them can be attached to something, or the actuator won’t be able to move.
The tent application is the closest one to something practical and the tent was not very rigid, nor was there any real advantage to it over conventional methods.
🤷♂️
True, but just to use them for things like adjustable legs - even as just a proof-of-concept was really cool.
Yes that was involved and they executed it well.