> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps.
Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do.
So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
There are lots of posts from them on the internet image search...and it seems they've gone to a number of industry conferences with samples.
I agree, that from a PR perspective, their pictures are too polished. They should show a piece in a less polished format.
wow that image is pretty bad; all sorts of weird inconsistencies in the wood stack that scream AI; I'm ignoring the license gibberish as that could be just removal of identifying info.
Yeah, inspecting the picture closely there are at least 20 to 30 things that immediately stand out as "AI did this". There are so many things wrong with those chairs on the right. The wood support beams are just not right, nobody would build like this.
But I’m not sure if it a real photo or some sort of… analogy? Under “INTRODUCING SUPERWOOD: THE NEXT GENERATION OF BUILDING MATERIALS,” we can see one piece that looks like an actual piece of wood, and then some other ones that looks like an artificial wood-looking finish wrapped around some core which visually looks metallic (but which, I assume, is actually their engineered wood).
I dunno. I guess “being wood” is more about the ecological impact in this case. If it is replacing steel and it looks ugly, well, a lot of steel looks ugly and then gets covered up.
This is so spot on. The fact that there isn't a single image showing an ACTUAL comparison, even of small samples, is a massive red flag for a company that is advocating the "aesthetic" properties of it's product.
Then, even worse, they RELY ENTIRELY ON UNLABELED AI GENERATED IMAGES.
I cannot imagine a better way to say "there's a high chance everything we've promised is fake news". Just make sure to squint before looking at our ad copy!
This is a relaunch. Here's their launch video from May 2024.[1]
The video has some CG of a piece of their wood, plus stock shots of trees, cities, wind turbines, people looking through microscopes, etc.
U. of Maryland announced this specific process back in 2018.[2] They got a paper into Nature.[3]
Densified wood is over a century old. [4] You can buy something called "Lignostone".[5] But that is a material where they took the lignin out and put some plastic in. (Remember "transparent wood" from a few years ago. Same concept, with a transparent plastic.)
This new process takes the lignin out and compresses the cell structure.
If you could send in $20 and get a little cube of the stuff to look at and test, this would be more convincing.
Thanks for the link! As pessimistic as I am toward this company it sounds like something that could be quite neat if it actually exists.
However, I lost all hope (of the little I had) after their sales rep said they "densify" their wood. My dude, if you need to spin so hard you pull out a thesaurus for "compress" it's not a great look.
Because they don't just compress their wood! That's the step after putting it in a vacuum and baking it and heating it up so that the lignin depolymerizes. The video does a great job of explaining how this is different from just sticking wood into a press.
Sure did. You're right it seems to be in use widely (in the wood compression industry), not that it seems to have any distinction from compression... (I say from my uninformed perspective)
E.g. it feels along the lines of "we didn't just heat it, we THERMO-MODIFIED (tm) it." No matter they mean the same thing, doesn't the second one just sound cooler?!? /s
Same ilk as "deconstructed" food, "artisanal" crafts, "synergy", ...
in a mechanical sense, a compressed object goes back to normal when the stress is removed, unless you break it. if the work piece did not go back to its original shape, you arent just conpressing anymore. eg. you are likely "cold working" it instead.
if youre applying heat, you might be "forging" or "casting" while applying that compressive force.
I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon. I doubt I'm the only person with this knee jerk reaction (I say without any statistics or evidence I can link in).
Same with any product that is over or deceptively advertised.
If their stuff was good, provably so, then they'd prove it on their own merits. They wouldn't need to fill a website with 99% AI slop if they had anything else of any substance.
Or, it's definitely possible I'm in the % of people who is overly sensitive to bullshit, and I fall outside the target audience of their AI slop. Similarly to how spam emails include typos to filter out people who are actually paying attention.
> I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon.
Unfortunately every profession with any depth of knowledge will have jargon. Even house staff at a restaurant will talk about 2-tops and 4-tops, etc. It's just jargon, or better yet, convenient abstraction to describe the problem space these people live and breath.
The more layman’s wording you use, the less accurate you will be. The reason for industry specific “jargon” is just that those are words that happen to be the most accurate and descriptive words for whatever materials or processes used.
If you use too much jargon, people outside can’t understand what you are talking about. If you use too little jargon, then whatever you are talking about will be too vague.
People use more specific terms because they mean something more specific than the generic term. Often within domains of expertise, people know the topic extremely well so they naturally use specific terms, and they also need to speak very specifically.
The more exciting something would be, the more likely it's BS. It's what survives.
Projects just make it a lot further that way. The consumer wants to believe. The doer has to believe. The invester will take a hit on the cheek for the moon.
Yes the final product will preserve the wood grain in some form. The paper has a few images of the final product. They basically boil out all the non-cellulose and compress what remains into a smaller form. I assume the strength is that a super board of the same size would be made of several boards' worth of wood fibers. I haven't read enough yet, but I wonder if this substantially lowers weight / strength. Right now, steel is required for tall buildings because there is an upper limit to how high you can go before wood buckles. There are no 300 m trees after all.
fwiw, I first thought this was going to be some innovation in glue, which allows manufacturers to turn wood chips and sawdust into MDF, OSB, and particle board. These are typically weaker than sawyered beams of the same size because the glue is not as strong as the cellulose fibers that run the length of a beam. (However, they are getting applied more and more in the construction in the US because it is crazy expensive to find a tree that can produce thick enough 40 ft beams, but you can easily get enough sawdust to make an even thicker, precut MDF board.) But I thought no shot, because if you can make glue that is stronger than cellulose, then why bother with the wood?
Someone posted what's probably the study it's based on below, it looks to be Figure 2d and 10e. As suggested, it's just darkened in a nice looking way (without stain) which frankly doesn't seem like it's necessarily a good thing.
Normally when you quote someone, and they are making reference to a picture, the picture is logically close close to the words referencing the content in the picture.
Show the [beep]ing picture!