Here’s some I printed earlier... the 3D revolution

Don’t shop for your essentials: you can now make your own sunglasses, headphones and even shoes at home
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20 December 2012

Like an ugly sister, I am hopping around the 3D Systems stall at the 3D Printshow in the City, trying to find a shoe that fits. Around me, compact grey machines are busy printing little brightly-coloured plastic coffee cups — from one of which I later drink a blindingly strong espresso.

For the baffled: when a 3D design is sent to print, the 3D printer squirts out a fine jet of plastic, which builds up layer by layer to create an object.

I arrived with the intention of printing a shoe for myself in precisely the same manner. However it turns out that to print a shoe to fit my big feet on a home printer, like the ones at work here, would take all day and have to be made in several pieces. I’d have been better off with the more reasonable expectation of a robot figurine or a toy crown.

Never mind, while searching for a “one-they-printed-earlier” shoe I also come across some headphones (yes, that actually work) and a pair of sunglasses. By the time I discover my white, uncomfortable and hideously (but remarkably intricately) designed shoe I have 3D printed accessories hanging off every available area of my body.

Earlier this month, 3D Systems, which kickstarted the industry way back in 1986, won a prestigious technology award for its Cube printers. The Cube — the machines making the coffee cups at the Printshow last Friday — was the first consumer 3D printer to be brought to the market.

Smaller than the average coffee machine, the Cube can print anything you can design — provided it is no bigger than the 5.5in printing plate — out of ABS plastic in one of 10 colours.

The plastic comes in cartridges which you just plug in — and if you’re no good at 3D design, you can use stock models or online apps that allow you to customise artwork templates to suit your own preferences. It costs $1,299.

None of my gear has been printed on the Cube, however. You can still order them online (on Cubify.com) but the headphones, full-size shoes, sunglasses (or any other larger design you want to send for printing) require 3D systems to print them on the bigger, industrial machines.

So, for the average punter, the Cube, with limitations on size and materials probably has a similar appeal to that early Eighties mobile phone so big you had to carry it around in a suitcase.

Yet what it represents is a look at a not-very-distant future. Already commercial printers can print in ceramics, metals and plastics and create all kinds of custom objects such as guitars, car bodies or even hip joints and the outer shell of prosthetic limbs.

In July, a designer for aircraft manufacturer Airbus revealed the company intends to produce the first printed plane by 2050.

MakerBot, which produces a rival home 3D print device to the Cube, the Replicator 2, had on its stall small, 3D printed plastic models of houses. The future, according to MakerBot’s Nick Brewer, is to have your house printed on site, in concrete, from a custom 3D design.

And the prosthetics printers believe that one day they’ll be able to print organic tissue.

For the consumer market, 3D systems has already acquired technology that will allow you to take a photo of an object on your phone and turn the picture into a printable 3D image.

In future, with multi-material, at-home printing, getting a replacement part for your bike could be as easy as photographing it and pressing print.

Similarly, much of what we purchase online could be immediately sent to home printers, cutting out delivery.

But while 3D Systems views the future as a time when we will all be getting creative and printing our own designs, Sculpteo, a 3D printing company that currently allows people to custom design iPhone cases and have them printed, is not so sure.

“Creating something in 3D is difficult — more difficult than painting. The tools [for 3D design] will get easier and easier to use … but even though people have all the tools for painting, not many are as good as Picasso,” says Sculpteo CEO Clément Moreau.

Fortunately Cubify.com and MakerBot’s Thingiverse already let designers upload their 3D templates for purchase (on Cubify) or for free (on Thingiverse) — allowing the less creative of us to turn other people’s hard work into printed objects.

“In future, 3D printing will just become a normal, more economical way of producing custom products ... it costs the same whether you print one or many.” says Moreau. “We really believe it’s going to be a mass market technology.”

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