If you haven’t heard of 3D printers yet, the tech industry is betting you will soon.
3D printers are the latest bridge between science fiction and fact. It’s a machine about the size of a microwave that promises to build almost any object.
A 3D printer works much like an inkjet printer except instead of squirting ink to paper, it layers solid materials upwards to create three dimensional objects. You only need to upload a blueprint of the object you want built, and then the machine does the rest. Plastics, resins and even metals are then slowly fused and moulded until the object is completely built.
Bre Pettis calls the arrival of 3D printing the new industrial revolution. Pettis is co-founder of Makerbot, a company selling 3D printers at the consumer level. Makerbot recently opened its first retail store in Manhattan.
“The first industrial revolution was all about getting big machinery into factories so that we could do mass manufacturing,” says Pettis. “That was huge because it meant everybody could have bowls and forks and spoons because you could make them en masse. Now those machines, we’ve made them small, they fit on your desktop or coffee table, and you get to have the means of production.”
Makerbot has also set up an online marketplace where users share and download designs for real world objects. And just as the internet made sharing music files commonplace; the same may come true for downloadable designs of physical objects.
“Back in 2008, you could download movie, you could download music, but you couldn’t download things,” Pettis explains.
In North Carolina, Dr. Anthony Atala works with a 3D printer modified for medical use. He explains that his printer uses “the same printing technology you have at home, but instead of printing sheets of paper with ink, we’re actually printing tissues with cells.”
Dr. Atala’s specialty is in regenerative medicine. He says bioprinting is really just an extension of his own field.
“Printing is really just a mechanism that allows us to accelerate the production of these tissues,” he says. “We’re actually working on many different types of body parts. We’re working on ears, noses, blood vessels, cartilage, bone, organs such as kidneys. There’s still a long way to go before these technologies are able to get into the clinic in a widespread fashion. Right now the project is being aimed for clinical trials, small patient trials, and really trying the technologies out slowly so one day we can get them to a larger number of patients.”
In Austin, Texas, Cody Wilson, a law student, is leading a group that’s designing a digital blueprint for a working gun. Their hope is that, when completed, anyone could download their design and build the gun using a 3D printer.
“Where there’s a computer, there’d be a weapon.” He says. “It’s not magic, you know, it’s just, it’s software. So it’s like designing anything.”
Using a 3D printer is certain to be controversial. But Wilson told 16×9 that, for him, it’s strictly a political project.
“You know, I don’t think you should be armed, right? But I think you should have the choice to be,” he says. “My goal in many ways is to say, you know there isn’t anything you’re going to be able to do about this – welcome to your printable future.”
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