3pointD.com

Saul Hansell has a pretty nice piece in The New York Times today all about 3D printers and the possibility of their becoming cheap enough for home use. It’s a great vision, although it kind of misses two things: first, even though printers can be had increasingly cheaply, the materials needed to make solid, sturdy objects are very expensive. Second, printing out a 3D object is not as simple as just sketching on paper or sticking some primitives together in Second Life. A lot of work has to be done to insure that the object you’re trying to print is in fact internally consistent in a way the printer can handle, so that it won’t fall apart in the end. Neither of those points are mentioned, but they’re not insurmountable obstacles. Material prices will of course come down over time. And one of the potentially most promising uses Hansell mentions for the devices are to do things like “print out replacements for a dishwasher rack at home” (which doesn’t require any design knowledge on the user’s part). I imagine this will be how they’re used most often, to print out simple items the designs for which can be downloaded over the Internet. I really dig that vision of the future, in which I don’t have to go to the hardware store to buy some new jewel cases for the CDs I’m burning for friends, or a new part for the coffeemaker I broke last week. It isn’t quite here yet, but it’s probably coming.