Soon everyone will have a 3D printer. It may not be this year, or next year, but within the next few years, people will have gravitated towards paying for designs, and then printing their goods. I know this idea sounds foreign if you’ve never heard of a 3D printer before (I wasn’t aware of it till yesterday), but the idea is that a printer can print 3D objects.
To perform a print, the machine reads the design from an .stl file and lays down successive layers of liquid, powder, paper or sheet material to build the model from a series of cross sections. Below is an example of what a 3d printer can produce.
The quality and complexity of printer designs, however, as well as the quality of kit or finished products, varies greatly from project to project. This rapid development of open source 3D printers is gaining interest in many spheres as it enables hyper-customization and the use of public domain designs to fabricate open source appropriate technology through conduits such as Thingiverse and Cubify.
People create the designs! Think about it, the world will be filled with people like you and me spending time designing goods, uploading the design to a shopping area like Amazon, and people will purchase your design and print them out of their printers. If this doesn’t make you say Whoa!, your mind isn’t able to comprehend the potential capabilities of this. I almost want to spend a grand just to understand what stage we are at currently. I also believe an amazing aspect of this project is that our brightest minds on the planet will continue to work out the kinks of something so groundbreaking that this idea will come to fruition to the masses. This is a monumental challenge and when people want to overcome challenges, they do.
“One of the greatest things about 3D printing is that there are some limitations, but as with any engineering challenge these really inspire people to push past them,” says Pettis. “I’m just curious what the community will do together and what kind of problems we can solve.”
My feeling is that the quality of the parts these printers are producing at this stage are pretty crappy but that will evolve with time. How awesome will it be when you shatter your coffee mug on the ground, go to your computer, print a new one, and not blink an eye. A quick word though is that I watched a video where a printer printed a car wheel and it took 4 hours so that scenario isn’t exactly there yet. Nevertheless, this idea will revolutionize the way we shop and the customization of items we own. I’m pretty psyched for what’s to come.
I’m all on board with this idea. I snapped a salad tong in line today at an office-sponsored lunch and immediately wished I had one of these puppies so I didn’t feel so much like a douche when the next 25 people in line had to use them like chopsticks. Although it probably wouldn’t have finished printing until it was time for dinner. Or lunch next Thursday.
Looks like SSYS could be a winner here, though I wish its market cap was less than 3B already. ONVO looks interesting… bio-medical 3D printing.
I actually used this technology in 2007 to develop my grad thesis piece (http://brookesbritcher.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/rim-2007/). Just 6 years ago it took about 4 hours per piece on this table (roughly 50 and all white) – and substantial delicate cleaning with compressed air and binder spraying. The progress has been astounding. If they can find a way to make this dense enough, imagine what this could offer the carpentry industry (nails, joints, screws, etc.)
Sadly, people are doing this with it. Yes, it still takes a 3D printer – and CAD (which is costly)…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/08/3d-printed-guns-blueprints-downloaded-100000-times-in-two-days-with-some-help-from-kim-dotcom/
Btw – If you should check out laser cutters and water cutters (can cut through steel)…