If you have ever fancied yourself as something of an amateur inventor or designer but never seemed to have the resources to make your vision a reality, your day may have finally arrived.
Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.
3-D printing’s uses are virtually unlimited. Small businesses and startups can order prototypes for potential customers, artists can have a new medium with which to play, friends can create their own unique gifts to give, and prosumers can whip up a redesign for a company.
In an age when Starbucks’ die-hard caffeine addicts spend hours combing mystarbucksidea.com for ways to improve a business in which they have no professional stake in, it’s not a stretch to see similarly devoted customers producing actual mock ups of improved products for a favorite brand. But will it really catch on?
Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson thinks so. He told MIT’s Technology Review that he thinks people will eventually have these printers at home.
Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?
Comments RSS
| TrackBack URI
[...] can this change the invention and prosumption process? Find out @ Attention Prosumers: 3D Printing Now Affordable And there you have it - The Wikinomics Roundup: (Two) Week(s) in [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Wikinomics Roundup: Two Weeks in Review - August 15, 2008 5:13 pm
Beautiful concept. Just printed an object. Unfortunately they don’t offer full color scale models ( maquette ) like we print in 3d for architects and product developers
cheers
rene
Comment by sotopia - August 16, 2008 9:29 am
If you’re interested in following the news on 3D Printing and digital fabrication, you might consider reading our blog at Fabbaloo or http://fabbaloo.com
Comment by General Fabb - August 18, 2008 11:04 pm
[...] Attention Prosumers: 3D Printing Now Affordable Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and … [...]
Pingback by 3d printing | Printing & Publishing - Printing Products, Printing Machinery Exporters, DVD Movie Exporters and more - October 10, 2008 12:30 am