How Studio OS is Keeping it Real
Studio OS is a generative design app in development under HILOS, an end-to-end product creation platform for brands to design, make, and remake without waste. As an innovation lighthouse, Studio is always seeking new ways to push the needle on design and 3D printing to help brands overcome the limitations of traditional footwear manufacturing. To do this, new tooling had to be developed — and thus Studio OS was born.
Where We Are
Nearly every major 3D design application has some form of AI feature with similar promises to “transform ideas into reality” or go “from concept to reality”, and more recently, we’ve seen an uptick in generative AI models that bridge the gap between 2D and 3D. These days, the word “reality” is a fuzzy concept. Without getting too deep into taxonomies of existence or digital dualism, it’s safe to say that the current landscape of 3D generative design falls short in delivering models for manufacture in the Real Environment.
In the chart above, our current landscape is being compared against the Reality-virtuality continuum that ranges between the completely virtual, and the completely real. What 3D generative design of today promises in terms of delivering “reality” ends at Augmented Reality, leaving us with a real need to bridge the gap between 3D CAD and STL output for additive manufacturing. While generative design has made significant advancements in digital manufacturing at large, legacy footwear design and manufacturing hasn’t changed much since WWII, and remains inaccessible to independent brands and designers.
Where We Need To Be
At HILOS, we saw an opportunity to build a new kind of cyberphysical operating system that leverages generative AI and machine learning to continually enhance and optimize the design and digital manufacture of wearables for a more circular economy, powered by our innovative Method of Make and modular design system called MAGIC™.
To do this, we combined MAGIC™ with generative AI models from leaders such as OpenAI and Hugging Face, and used machine vision trained on footwear data to identify last shape and component types across various classifications. This fusion of technologies along with applied manufacturing logic enabled us to build a no-CAD, agile product creation workflow that bridges 3D design to the production line.
HILOSPHERE Community
While still in early stages of development, we’re excited to continue our research and training with the broader community in the coming months. We’ll be onboarding initial cohorts of passengers to demo our text-to-image generator through Discord and participate in user testing, feature requests, exclusive competitions, and more. As an early adopter, you’ll be integral in helping us shape our AI models and extended ecosystem.
Developer Platform
How we build is just as important as why we build. Our design and development methodologies lean heavily on composable frameworks that incorporate small, modular components under MACH principles: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless. In many ways, our approach to circular design systems and digital manufacturing mirror these same principles — we like flexibility and dislike waste as much as technical debt. As we move closer towards establishing our Developer Platform, we’ll be tapping the dev community to build third-party integrations and extended functionality into our ecosystem.
