Is this the template for the killer app of 3D Printing? "It's the future, and it’s here ... starting with robots, like we knew it would. Your creativity is endless – make it real." ---Kodama Studios (the people who brought you Artify for the iPhone)
3D creation for everyone - Kodama’s coolest plaything yet, My Robot Nation, launches at SIGGRAPH 2011! MyRobotNation.com’s (a joint venture with Offload Studies and Z-Corp) fun and easy creation tools let everyone, everywhere make and share totally unique designs, then materialize them in the real world as full-color 3D printed figures!
"3D printing has been refined to the point where digital models can be duplicated into physical prototypes or production parts that closely resemble mass-produced products in looks and function ...Yesterday’s factory is evolving into a global community of custom design and personal fabrication services"
The Objet260 Connex is a multi-material 3D printer. The printer can, in a single print job, combine up to 14 material types, textures and shades, drawn from a palette of over 60 materials, including rubber, transparent!, to engineering plastics ...
I love the way 3D printers are advertised. Many of the ads focus on the ability of the printer to perform seemingly impossible feats and diverse tasks, opening possibilities that, until you see them with your own eyes, would never occur to you.
The way 3D printers are marketed in 2011 reminds me of the early ads from 1984 for that seminal computing device, the Apple Macintosh. Many of the Macintosh ads also focused on the 'new new' things you could DO with Apple's suite of early WIMPS (window, icon, menu, pointing device) driven applications, such as never before seen (other than in a lab at PARC) graphical bitmap editing.
Below the Objet260 ad is the famous 1984 ad by Steve Jobs, a wonderful example of his showmanship. I've written before about the parallels between the emergent consumer 3D printing capability and the early PC industry. Does this portend similar explosive growth for the 3D Printer? Who will be the Steve Jobs of the consumer 3DP industry? Are the PC, and the 3D Printer, both generic multi-purpose devices, following a similar trajectory?
