Drexler’s Nanofactory Design Animation Now Available as Streaming Media

September 1, 2005 | Source: KurzweilAI

“Productive Nanosystems: From Molecules to Superproducts,” an animated video, is now available in streaming media format on KurzweilAI.net. The large 80 MB file previously took a long time to download, so access was limited.

Productive nanosystems are a goal of Dr. K. Eric Drexler’s twenty-year research in nanotechnology. To illustrate the concept, he has worked with engineer-animator John Burch to produce this 3D tour of one potential design, showing its mechanisms in action.

“Quantum chemistry software has verified the molecular transformations at critical places in the design,” said Dr. Drexler. “The overall system breaks down common molecules and reassembles molecular fragments into basic shapes. These basic shapes can be combined to form devices ranging from laptop computers to medical sensors smaller than a blood cell.”

Dr. Drexler designed and analyzed the processes shown at the molecular level of the factory and provided guidance and feedback during the entire project. He is a researcher, author, and policy advocate focused on emerging technologies and their consequences for the future. He pioneered studies of productive nanosystems and their products (the still-theoretical field originally termed “nanotechnology”). He has authored numerous technical publications on this topic as well as books including Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which first introduced the basic concepts to a general audience, and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, an applied-physics analysis of advanced productive nanosystems.

He founded the Foresight Institute (where he served as Chairman until 2004), and is presently Chief Technical Advisor of Nanorex Inc., a company developing software for the design and simulation of molecular machine systems. In 1991 he received a doctoral degree in the field of molecular nanotechnology from MIT, the first degree of its kind.

Collaborator John Burch, an electrical engineer and for the past six years, owner and chief animator of Lizard Fire Studios, an animation studio in Austin, Texas, provided mechanical design for most of the non-chemical mechanisms of the factory as well as the concept of using extrusion in the final stage. All mechanical and character animation, audio recording and production were provided by Lizard Fire Studios.

Lizard Fire Studios contributed over six months of full-time resources to this project to get it to version 0.8. At that point, Mark Sims and Nanorex contributed a challenge grant that allowed the project to be completed and to release version 1.0.