If you’re waiting for desktop additive-manufacturing technology to move closer to professional-level results, be prepared to wait for a very long time.
The past year was a breakout for desktop 3-D printing. MakerBot released two new models, Formlabs debuted the first prosumer 3-D printer to use high-accuracy stereolithography, and a slew of innovative, printed projects lifted awareness and desirability of additive manufacturing for the general public.
But the year ended with a legal hiccup. Formlabs will be dealing with a patent infringement lawsuit brought against them by 3D Systems, one of the biggest players in the industry. The hobbyist segment of the industry has been built on the back of expired patents, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, many patents that will be required to advance the state of the art will not expire for years or even a decade.
We’ve uncovered 10 patents that could severely stifle innovation in the low-cost segment of the 3-D printing market and keep you from making colorful, smooth-finished figures and precise, articulating parts. These patents cover core technologies and ease-of-use features, and could take momentum from the upstarts and return it to the entrenched companies.
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How Big Business is Stymying Makers’ High-Res, Colorful Innovations
CharlesWT
I think I am stupid, but still do not understand how it works (3D-printing)
Is it like automated sculpturing?
Cornell bioengineers and Weill Cornell Medical College physicians have created an artificial ear that looks and acts like a natural ear, giving new hope to thousands of children born with a congenital deformity called microtia.
They used 3-D printing and injectable gels made of living cells to fashion ears that are practically identical to a human ear.
Over a three-month period, these flexible ears grew cartilage to replace the collagen used to mold them
The novel ear may be the solution reconstructive surgeons have long wished for to help children born with ear deformity, said co-lead author Dr. Jason Spector, director of the Laboratory for Bioregenerative Medicine and Surgery and associate professor of plastic surgery at Weill Cornell.
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3D-printed ears that look and act like the real thing
Will the future be printed in 3-D?
At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.
Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.
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Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3-D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications.”
It won’t necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said that the technology “is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon.” But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. “The bigger opportunity in the U.S. is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization.”
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Disruptions: On the Fast Track to Routine 3-D Printing
This is leading to so many good things. And isn’t it thrilling to think: our own Forrest S. Higgs was among the pioneers in this field!
But guess what? I’ll bet the printing of sex toys will play a big role in both the advancement of the technology and the lowering of its costs. (Sigh.)
Yes…
The 3D-Printed Sex Toy Industry is Growing Bigger
I am currently printing out Gael Langevin’s open source Inmoov robot…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tojIdfywYVI
…with the notion of using parts of the design in a haptic telepresence robot of my own design that will allow people to do manual labour over a broadband link anywhere in the world.
http://haptictelepresence.blogspot.com/
I’m currently working on using a Microsoft Kinect sensor to capture human movement and a PC to translate the captured human motion convert the position information to servo motor control parameters to run the Inmoov.
The possibility that anybody could take any job anywhere in the world is, I think, just about as disruptive a technology as I could unleash on our corrupt ruling class.
Forrest
Your words “our corrupt ruling class.” now mean different things to me in the light of reading russian article. Could you clarify what does it mean for you?
Vlad: When I refer to our “corrupt ruling class”, I refer to the network of political, industrial and social leaders who prosper by means rent-seeking rather than producing the new innovations and products which a healthy society and economy will. I don’t see that is particularly inconsistent with ЮЛИЯ ЛАТЫНИНА’s thesis. She, however, concentrates on the broad social demographic whereas I focus on the ruling class.