Turn Your Jam Into an iPhone Case

Forget ringtones. Now you can use your favorite song or random sound to create an iPhone case. The Vibe, a service from Shapeways and Soundcloud, will take your snippet and 3-D print its wave shape using “a whole lot of math and lasers.”


“We were inspired by a Tumblr post by Fred Wilson, showcasing a 3-D printed waveform of the Tōhoku earthquake in Japan,” says Brad Dickason, the Vibe’s director of product. “Immediately, a bunch of sound-based products popped into our heads and we started hacking.”


Shapeways builds the case by taking Soundcloud’s waveform and sampling it at six different frequencies. The resulting averages are overlaid to create the design for the case, which is printed using their “strong and flexible” nylon-based plastic. “It’s quite suitable for iPhone cases, which are very thin and need to protect against a fall, but also must be stretched around the phone to fit,” says Mary Huang, designer of The Vibe.

They experimented with simply printing the waveform, and with turning it into jewelry, before settling on the iPhone case. Dickason says they’ve seen everything from dubstep songs to kids printing “I love you” as gifts for their mothers. Here’s a recording of children laughing, that you can use as a case if you’re into that sort of thing.

One of the biggest challenges the designers faced was getting the case to reliably fit the phone. “The difference between a case fitting snugly and falling off comes down to fractions of millimeters,” she says. After a lot of prototyping, they found a model that would easily snap to the four corners.
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/04/soundcloud-iphone-case/