3D Printing On Demand

Iddo Genuth writes "The Netherlands based company Shapeways is beta testing a new service allowing people to print three-dimensional models. Customers can upload designs or use a creation tool hosted at the Shapeways website, then order a printed model of their designs for less than $3 per square centimeter. The printed items are shipped to the customer in ten days or less, bringing 3D printing to consumers and not just companies large enough to afford their own printers."

Comments

Eh?

[Colin Smith]

Shouldn't that be cubic centimetres? Y'know... The third dimension.

 

Re:Eh?

[TheEmptySet]

You can happily use a 2D (Hausdorf) measure on a 3D set. No problem. But the result would be infinite. I imagine they plan to be quite expensive.

Re:Eh?

[ShieldW0lf]

You can get your own printer for under a grand from Bits from Bytes. Then you can use it to make them for your friends.

I'm planning on getting one in the new year.

Re:Eh?

[Zey]

Oh, for goodness sake: try to at least catch up to the twentieth century, will you.

Yes, look, I know you're still agonising over whether to teach creationism in school science classes and burn witches over there, but, you must surely realise the consequences of your letting the world leave you behind, right?

Re:Eh?

[ljw1004]

"Shapeways -- 2d pricing for 3d products"!!!

As always, the summary website is wrong. If you go to shapeways.com they explain:

How is your pricing calculated?

Our pricing is based upon the actual amount of material used in your model. So the actual volume of your finished object not the volume of the bounding box. If you click on the order tab next to any model the system will calculate the price for you. All prices includes shipping and handling.

Waaaaaah?

[wisty]

So will they mind if some of the 'prototypes' have an eerie resemblance to 40k minitures?

Re:Waaaaaah?

[Gerafix]

Probably not, but I'm sure they will get tired of receiving over nine thousand penis designs though.

Dupe.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/1344232

A new copyright battle?

[91degrees]

Right now this process is quite expensive, so this isn't going to be a problem, but I can imagine this getting cheaper.

Some people are going to be using this to make 3D copies of cheap plastic items they own. Another poster mentioned Warhammer miniatures, and I could imagine lots of other small but expensive items being copied.

Once someone with money takes notice of this, I guarantee a legal battle tying to make it illegal.

Re:A new copyright battle?

[jamesh]

So... what? Now we are going to have 'Miniature cloning is stealing' blurbs on packaging for small-but-expensive items? 'When you cloning this miniature, you are cloning COMMUNISM'.

Interesting times ahead...

Re:A new copyright battle?

[91degrees]

No! If I'm vague and general I can claim my rightful credit as a seer if this happens. If I'm too specific people will nitpick on the points where I'm wrong.

Re:A new copyright battle?

[inviolet]

Some people are going to be using this to make 3D copies of cheap plastic items they own.

I'd like to see the following system put in place:

• Every manufacturer of anything that has plastic components, is required to upload the components' specs to an escrow agency. Things like plastic cases, battery door covers, hinges, knobs, you name it, all will be escrowed.
• While the manufacturer is in existence and offering spares for sale, you buy your replacement parts from them in the u$ual way.
• After n years, or if the manufacturer goes under, the escrow agency releases the specs to the public.
• You can then download the specs and print out your own replacement parts.

This wouldn't affect anyone's bottom line, and it wouldn't let you rip off their electronic components (which is where the real investment is at)... it would simply let you get replacement parts during those times when, traditionally, you couldn't.

Some companies might even choose to release their plans early, on their website or whatever, in order to get goodwill.

Re:A new copyright battle?

[lysergic.acid]

while i don't think the effect of this particular service will be so drastic, i do think that if we event Star-Trek-style "replicators" the material economy would quickly become an anachronism. that is, if we manage to overcome the rearguard reaction to such an "anti-American" action.

i mean, just look at the situation with IP/copyright/patent law. it costs nothing to replicate digital music, movies, code, etc. but there is still a large legally enforced economy around the trade of such 'free' commodities. this is also the reason why the Google Book Search project was stonewalled by print publishers. it would have been an incredibly boon to humanity for such a digital literary repository to be published for free online, giving children/students unprecedented access to the largest corpus of human knowledge ever assembled. such a digital library would be invaluable in terms of the cultural & academic utility it would provide, possibly revolutionizing our society.

but if we couldn't eliminate the legal & economic barriers preventing such a useful and societally beneficial project form being realized, it's doubtful we'd be able to eliminate our capitalist economy by eliminating the cost of material production. unfortunately, we live in a society where corporate interest outweighs public interest. there's no way our corporate plutocrats will allow us to take away their sole source of power and privilege.

Re:A new copyright battle?

[kylben]

"the whole basis of capitalism is based on scarcity, "

No, the whole basis of capitalism is trading something of lesser value for something of greater value. Physical scarcity is based on materials and labor, product scarcity is based on ideas, materials, and labor. This will severely diminish the labor from mass produced items, but there will still be things that require human labor (like repairing these printers, for instance). It will also make the artificial scarcity of reproduceable ideas moot, but the value of knowledge that can't be reproduced, such as a live concert by Coldplay or a conversation with Cory Doctorow, won't see any diminishment of scarcity. The material scarcity will remain, although the limiting factor will be increasingly raw materials rather than manufactured materials.

Capitalism will still function just fine. People will still value the products as much as they ever do, but the manufacturers will value them less - because they can make more of them with the same value of resources - so the price will go down.

Or were you referring to the bastard stepchild that Bush and Paulson and Bernanke and the MAFIAA refer to as "capitalism"?

Reprap

[gringer]

The article says that "the cheapest three dimensional printers cost $20,000", so I might as well mention the hacker's alternative:

http://blog.reprap.org/
http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Re:Reprap

[iamdrscience]

I've looked at a number of the "cheap" and homebrew 3D printers and honestly, I've been roundly unimpressed by all of them. The engineering effort is always great and their goals are surely worth persuing, but thus far the results of these printers leave much to be desired: at best looking like an *okay* hand-made model and more often looking more like an artistically shaped pile of poop. I don't mean to knock these projects, but the technology isn't really there yet. I mean, even some of the expensive commercial 3D printers don't produce spectacular results.

Re:Reprap

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't mean to knock these projects, but the technology isn't really there yet.

I think you will find that is exactly why these projects exist. They are developing the technology.

Not just a dupe, not even news...

[argent]

This isn't even vaguely news. There's been 3d printing services like this for years. Just google for them...

not only is this not news

[Libertarian001]

But it's a duplicate add from a few months back for the same company pimping their crappy service. Why do I say crappy? I've done a few prints (30+, actually) on the Objet Eden, the same manufacturer this SERVICE BUREAU is using. My bureau uses a high end machine set to high resolution. These guys use the low end machine set to high speed. And they've decided to write some proprietary translator to take my perfectly functional files and mangle them so they can't be used (and these guys have major self-induced scaling issues). In short, they're a bureau, nothing more.

Nothing new about this...

[swatje]

There is really nothing new about this kind of service... Materialise is offering this service for already 10 years... http://www.materialise.com/materialise/view/en/91955-Online+service.html

Cheap!?

[Aladrin]

http://www.shapeways.com/model/6280/limbtaker_trophy.html

This bookend (21x22x23cm) is $7800. How is that anything close to cheap?

Wireframe objects without much mass are considerably cheaper, but any statues with heft are insanely expensive.

http://www.shapeways.com/model/6277/queen.html

A chess queen... $319. Seriously!

Get a clue about how stuff is made

[Animats]

For those of you who have no idea how real, physical stuff is made, there's an entire industry of small "job shops" that will take your design and make a part for you. If you're anywhere near a industrial city, there's probably one in your neighborhood. Most will use machine tools, but ones with stereolithography machines aren't that rare.

If you're in Silicon Valley and want to use a stereolithography machine, check out TechShop, which has one of the better ones. It won't be busy when you visit.

Grand Opening Special...

[DieByWire]

Three dimensions for the price of two!