This is a Lamborghini Countach. It was created by taking a hyper-accurate 3-D model of an actual Lamborghini (made up of millions of polygons), then gradually decreasing the resolution of the model with 3-D software until the object is lo-resed down to its stealthy essence. United Nude, a shoe company founded by Rem D. Koolhaas (nephew to the Rem Koolhass), is applying this interesting technique (which they’ve dubbed the “Lo Res Project”) to its shoe designs.
Here’s one of the first shoes to be designed with the process:
I really like the effect. It’s a purely modern composition form, taking a medium most often used to create digital objects that are indistinguishable from their real-world counterparts. But here, they’re broken down into newly abstract geometric shapes that out of their very nature preserve notes of the original object; each data point that remains in the simplified form existed in the original, more accurate model. It’s what happens when you tell the software to show you a Lamborghini rendered with 24 triangles instead of 24 million.
The other trick here is that the low-resolution form is then what’s manufactured into a physical real-world object. With advanced 3-D scanners and 3-D printers, it’s even possible to skip the whole process of creating the 3-D model from scratch; just scan your object, render the ensuing model at a lower resolution, then press “print.” And out comes your Lamborghini lite.