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For U.S. soldiers who find themselves at the front lines of a future conflict, its fast becoming gospel, due to the way warfare is rapidly evolving on the battlefields of Ukraine, that drones will be crucial to winning (or losing) the fight But the roughly 500 U.S. dronemakers can only build about 100,000 a year combined, according to Ryan Carver, communications manager for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International. For comparison: One Chinese firm, DJI, can pump out millions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a year — 70% of the global supply. To ameliorate this challenge/problem, a number of startups believe 3D printing, specifically of drones, can help deploy new tech more quickly in the field. And the military is interested. Firestorm Labs, a San Diego-based startup building industrial 3D-printing solutions for the military, envisions those soldiers not just flying drones, but manufacturing them near the battlefield. The firms xCell expeditionary manufacturing system fits drone production within a 20-foot-long shipping container. Inside, customized HP industrial 3D printers can spin a six-foot-long drone body out of nine cubic inches of Nylon 12 powder in about 14 hours. Industrial 3D printing allows us to leapfrog a lot of the problems we have today, Firestorm CEO Dan Magy says. You can solve part of the drone manufacturing gap with new ways to build drones that dont require them to be exquisite. A number of startups like Firestorm hold up 3D printing, specifically of drones, as a means to not necessarily fully catch up to a rival, but to more quickly deploy new tech in the field. And the military is interested. In June, the Air Force awarded Firestorm a $100 million contract to make additively manufactured UAVs. [Photo: Firestorm] Numerous groups within the military have already been experimenting and training with 3D printing and drones. The tech has become more established in the defense world as a means for replacing parts, especially at remote bases or at sea — Snowbird Technologies out of Jacksonville, Florida, makes 3D-printing systems for naval ships so they can replace parts without having to return to port. Now its being piloted as a means to churn out UAVs. [Photo: Firestorm] It fits within the goals of the new administration, which includes an aggressive push toward drone warfare. In a memo this past July, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the military to bolster the nascent U.S. drone manufacturing base in part by focusing on low-cost drones. The army is launching a drone marketplace so different units can quickly try and test models. The U.S. military also just started SkyFoundry, a pilot program to ramp up production of small drones via innovative manufacturing methods, aiming for at least 10,000 a month. At Fort Campbell in Kentucky, soldiers in the 101st Airborne have been experimenting and training with EagleMav 3D-printed drones and the ABE 1.01, which is made via computer-controlled milling machines, says Major Jonathon Bless, the units deputy director of public affairs. As part of an effort called transformation in contact, where soldiers are building their own drones on base using commercial parts, the 101st has put hundreds of drones through their paces. [Photo: Firestorm] This is a bit of a cultural shift in the Army, Bless says. Previously, drones have been looked at as expensive reconnaissance equipment with fancy cameras. You dont want to lose one. These have been purposely designed at a low dollar value so we can start looking at them as lethal, kamikaze drones. Advocates for additive manufacturing have championed the tech as a nimble way to build outside of the highly regulated, risk-averse supply chains of traditional defense contracting, and as a mobile means of custom production. The Ukrainian army offers a real-time case study. Tali Rosman, an analyst with RHH Advisory, says a significant number of the nations drones are 3D printed. On the front lines, if certain munitions or parts run out, additive manufacturing can spin up relatively instantaneous solutions to adapt and deploy deadly drones. Since theyre likely only flying a handful of times before theyre destroyed, cost and speed are paramount. [3D printing] technology is getting faster, better, and taken seriously for the first time, says Ben Wynne, CEO of Intrepid Automation and an additive manufacturing expert. Weve reached this kind of perfect point where if people want to make simplequadcopter frames and iterate the design, they can scale up to hundreds or thousands rather quickly. Magy, who believes Firestorm can get its printing time down to under 4 hours, believes its a production race the nation needs to win. Everyone’s starting to build their own drone army, he says. Were going to solve that for the U.S.
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Last year Canva reworked its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is going for Adobe’s jugular. Affinitythe British company Canva bought in 2024is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here’s an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable UI. For free. [Image: Canva] You know, free free. “Free forever,” as Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer Cameron Adams tells me in a video interview. Free as in not paying a single dime for eternity (allegedly) instead of the up to $70 per month that Adobe charges for its full Creative Cloud subscription. If the new Affinity lives up to its promiseand, from what I’ve seen, it may actually do that and then someit will be a hard thing to ignore for any Adobe Creative Cloud user, even if they are fully invested in the company’s apps. Canva Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams [Image: Canva] When Canva bought Affinity, it kept British company independent and injected the capital needed to revamp the Affinity suit of apps into a bona fide Adobe competitor. As Adams tells me, the move was born from a radical rethinking of the entire creative world. “We’re really viewing the entire design ecosystem as one big entity,” he says. “It’s not about separation anymore. It’s not about professionals on one side, nonprofessionals on the other. It’s really about your entire team working together.” The company also saw an opportunity in the feedback they were getting from the creative community, who Adams says are fed up with “pricing model increases, with lack of transparency, just the feeling they weren’t being listened to, and a lack of innovation in the tools that they’ve been using for a very long time.” Break the workflow walls For Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson, this launch fulfills a vision his team has had for a long time: to finally bring the separate apps of Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher into one consolidated experience. “That’s what we’ve been building an entirely new app,” he says. Studios workflow [Image: Canva] Simply called Affinity, it organizes its immense power into dedicated “studios”Vector, Pixel, and Layoutthat you can switch between instantly within the same window, using a button bar switch on the top left corner of the UI. This is similar to other apps like DaVinci Resolve, which moves from edit to color correction, automagically morphing the interface to show you the tools you need at each stage without having to move to a new app, import a file, save, and move back to the previous tool. Affinity CEO Ash Hewson [Photo: Amber Pollack PhotographyCanva] With Affinity, the canvas, the layers, and everything else stays as you switch from bitmap to vector to layout and back. This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about eliminating the maddening workflow interruptions that kill creativity. “Previously, you’d have to kind of change app to do some more advanced vector sort of design work, and that would always mean kind of exporting this, bring it into a different app,” Hewson explains. “Whereas now, I can just go to the Vector Studio if I want to do any of that work.” Thanks to full GPU acceleration, everything is live and nondestructive, from applying a Gaussian blur to a vector object to painting a pixel-based mask on a filter effect. As Hewson demonstrated for me, you can adjust a gradient, warp text, or scrub through your entire edit history with zero lag. Even with thousands of layers, he claims. “I keep saying it, but it’s kind of very important because, obviously, it’s kind of what the competitors don’t do,” he says with a hint of pride. Custom interface In the new Affinity, you can customize the UI in any way you want. Hewson showed me how users can create their own “perfect studio,” a custom workspace that mixes and matches tools from any of the core disciplines. “Let’s say your workflow often includes raster brushes, vector tools, maybe even some layout tools as well,” Hewson says. “What you can do is actually just create your own studio.” [Image: Canva] This is a level of personalization that goes far beyond rearranging a few panels. You can build a lean UI for logo design, a robust one for photo compositing, and another for publication layout. These custom studios can then be saved and shared, creating a new way for teams to standardize workflows. [Image: Canva] It’s an appealing proposal, given that every designer works differently. It’s also a good solution against the one-size-fits-all bloat that has plagued professional creative software for years. The new Affinity gives you the power to build the exact tool you need, and hide the rest. [Image: Canva] ‘Craft to scale’ So, how does a free professional tool make business sense for Canva? Adams explains it to me with a simple mantra: “craft and scale.” The high-end, pixel-perfect “craft” happens in Affinity Studio. The “scale”where that craft is used to generate massive amounts of contenthappens in Canva. By making the craft tool free, Canva is betting it can grow the entire design ecosystem. The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds. For enterprise teams, this is the endgame. “The high-end designers or the creative team within an enterprise [will be] using Affinity to create all of their brand assets, their templates,” Hewson explains. “But then they upload all of those to Canva seamlessly so the rest of the teams within the business, who are not skilled designers, can scale on that.” [Image: Canva] The AI question Hewson says that unlike Adobe’s tools, the new Affinity remains a pure, unadulterated craft tool with no generative AI baked in except for enhancing existing tools like image scaling, which runs on-device. However, for those who want to edit with AI, that’s available through a new dedicated Canva AI Studio panel in the app. This is an optional, subscription-based layer. As he explains, you need a Canva Premium plan, and the AI features use the same credit pool as your main Canva account. Crucially, the optionality respects the designers who resent paying for AI they don’t want or trust. You can run the entire free experience without ever touching it (or just take it out of the UI altogether). The generative features, like Generative Fill, run on cloud servers using models from Leonardo, an AI company Canva acquired in 2024. It’s a good approach that runs counter to Adobe’s all-in-on-AI strategy. For professionals who are fed up with Adobe force feeding them generative AI in their subscriptions, Canva’s opt-in assistant option will be appealing. Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.
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Generative AI ranges from gimmicky to powerful, depending on its context. But the biggest shortcoming is that whatever you make isnt really all that editable you typically have to juggle several apps to get the outcome you want. Now, a new update to Canva, called Ask @Canva, makes just about everything youre working on editable by AI with a tap and a request. Ask @Canva is built upon Canvas first foundational modelan AI model it trained in-house specifically for its own purposes. Instead of generating static designs, it produces new projects as full, editable design templates. That means when Canva uses AI to generate your slide deck or social post, all of the text and photos are discreetly editable with the same basic interface Canva has offered for years. [Image: Canva] Typography is pulled from its library to match the tone of your work. Images and illustrations are generated by default, but swappable with your own. At the core of all of Canvas UX is invisible AI arranging and rearranging your work with aesthetic balance. But now, Canva is putting generative AI within close reach on every element in your work. Think of Ask @Canva as a design intern, or perhaps save me! button, that you can request to redesign or rewrite any element on the pageand even critique your entire project. [Image: Canva] How Ask @Canva works The feature follows Canvas aggressive adoption of generative AI into its UX. In 2023, Canva was the first in its peer group to bring barebones generative AI into its app. Then in 2024, it introduced Magic Studio, a suite of AI tools that solved practical problems for users (like extending an image or creating a simple animation). Earlier this year, it introduced the Visual Suite 2.0its biggest front end redesign in 13 years, which basically consolidates a lot of the app and its varying templates within a single window, so you could completely rebuild your project, switching it from a slide deck to a website, all while remaining within your main canvas in the Canva app. With its new model, Canva is repositioning its app as a creative operating system that uses AI to bind all media together. All of Canvas just make it for me AI tools should improve alongside the update. There is one big difference, however, in terms of Canvas new approach to AI beyond mere improvements to the model: Now, when you select anything on a pagea block of text, an image, a background colora tooltip pops up with an option to Ask @Canva. Tap it, and you can simply ask the software to do whatever youd like it to do to the asset in plain languageas if youre talking to a colleague, but the colleague is a robot. [Image: Canva] Ask Canva is part of our commenting . . . system, and it now lets you interact with Canva like it’s a collaborator, explains Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer at Canva. What makes Ask @Canva so powerful is that it understands both the element youre highlighting and its context within the greater project youre editing. So you might ask Canva to change an images illustration style to better match others on the page (a method traditionally known as style transfer). In a demo, Adams successfully asks the system to make a slice of pizza float in space. These AI edits all happen in situ. That said, you can also use Ask @Canva a step zoomed out, requesting its advice for how you should change your design. Im amused when Adams does this, and Ask @Canva compliments his use of a purple-blue gradient (which is so on-brand for Canva I cant tell if the AI understands its brand standards or if its algorithmic bias). But the AI also (astutely) calls out an unflattering contrast between the left and right sides of the page. It was the same critique I had waiting on my tongue. [Image: Canva] Building AI into every layer of Canva The human versus automated balance that Canva is working toward with AI has been interesting to track. You can now start any project by typing what you want into a Google Search-esque bar. Its AI will now ask you follow ups, tooabout the topic and tone of your projectso that its first draft of whatever you want to create is as close to your vision as possible. [Image: Canva] But Adams recognizes a lot of its customers still dont do that. They prefer to work from Canvas template library and just see a sample that resonates. With Ask @Canva, the company is likely appealing to these customers, too, by offering AI at a deeper layer of the project. Here, AI is not the tool used to start a project creatively from the top, but instead its entrenched deeply inside the interface to help solve a problem for which there may be no other ready tool. Every person is different, and it’s been the same [story] in software development for decades, says Adams. Yu’ve always needed to give people different approaches to the same problem, because some people are visual thinkers. Some people have no idea what they want on the page. For now, the great unifier of AI within Canva seems to be Ask @Canva: a tool hiding a click away for when everything else might fail. Yes, its another iteration of the prompt. But now, its not some grand orchestrator of your vision. Instead, its more like an emergency button available all the time, on every asset.
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