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Tesco: 3D Printing Will Come To Supermarkets 'Within a Few Years'
TinTops writes "The IT chief of supermarket giant Tesco has said he believes there is a market for 3D printing in large supermarkets, and that it will be 'good for customers.' Mike McNamara told V3: 'I think it will help Tesco as a company, I don't think it will be a bad thing. It'll be a great thing for customers, we'll have 3D printing in our stores. As retailers you'll always adapt. So new things come along — the internet came along, we adapted to that one. We kind of have the internet version two with smartphones now, which has been a bigger impact than the wired internet, we'll adapt to that, we'll adapt to 3D printing, we'll adapt to RFID. You live, you change.' McNamara thinks 3D printers will be commonplace in stores before they start showing up in significant numbers at people's homes. This could 'give shoppers a new reason to visit shops for quick access to niche items.'"
I could see cake decorations being printed on-demand in your local supermarket. Dad likes Game of Thrones? Print him a cyvasse set and put it on his birthday cake.
3d printing with sugar is well on its way to becoming a mature technology already, so yeah, a few years and I wouldn't be surprised to see it at the bakery.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
j/k, I think printing food at the grocery store might be a little farther off than this. However, I am trying to think of what would advantage there would be at the grocery store waiting for your chosen object to be printed, rather than what is going on now with low price-per-unit injection molded mass production. I'm sure there is something, many somethings out there suitable for this, I am just having a hard time figuring out what they are.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
I don't think we're all that far off from home 3D printing entering the range of "affordable" for most people. The technology keeps making significant jumps, with everything from shower curtain rings to guns being printed. Once wider adoption becomes a reality, the economic reality of greater mass production will bring it down in short order.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
No one makes their own clothes, very few people have a computerized sewing machine and buy clothes plans, what makes you think that something more complex and more esoteric is going to catch on like this? Too much sci-fi?
Also, given a market for drawings there might actually be something to print. Of course every pop culture firm is going to be suing every one to death for every depiction of mickey mouse or jar jar binks or the enterprise. I suppose that they will have trouble with toy manufacturers if they wanted to license such templates. I am not sure how many people will go and design their own. I practice by designing a chess set, but I got some high end software for free.
Then there is the cost of the resin, which is really why Costco wants to go into the business. I would assume that 3D printers are going to end up like ink jet printers. Many will have then, as they might only cost a few hundred dollars, bug the sticker shock might put them in a corner. Or like label makers. I have one, but I am not really willing to shell out the cost of a cartridge.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Expect Kinko's to be ready very soon. But then all the corner store offerings will go the way of photo printing outlets once the ability moves into the home.
Customer punches in "burger" and Tesco printer groans, sputters and out pops a miniature Horse. go Tesco!
"As a company, you know, internet version two, cat memes and WiFi, and now 3d printing. So, yes. Twitter trend and online social media crowd source hashtag."
3D printing, while conceptually cool, has a long way to go before it's commonly used in a Tesco. The people propping this story up were probably early purveyors for the flying car concept, and can you just imagine the same idiots you see on the road everyday flying?
I'm still waiting for the first story on "3D printing lung" from breathing PLA dust.
If you can't see where this is heading...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So I think 3D printing is cool and all that, and there's lots of value for some people, but as a 46-year old dad of two kids who is frequently at the supermarket, I struggle to figure out what I would need to 3D print.
I'm Canadian, so not interested in printing a gun, what else is there? What does a typical family need to 3D print these days?
Interesting concept indeed:
The peachy printer is a Photolithographic printer. That means it uses a controlled beam of light to cure light sensitive resin into hard objects... The software we wrote as an add on to blender takes the data from that 3D model and translates it into an audio waveform. It then plays the audio file out to the printer through the headphone jack in your computer. This waveform drives a pair of electro magnetic mirrors. The higher the volume, the higher the voltage, the more the mirrors move. The purpose of these mirrors is to reflect and control the path of the laser beam. By using the audio waveform generated from the 3D model data to drive the mirrors, we are able to get the laser beam to draw out the shape of the object.
Novel.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I remember sending my first email over a modem in the early 80's. By the time I was in college 10 years later Usenet, BBS'es, MUDs, and the like were old hat to me, but the general public had no real use for computers and even many of my classmates still used actual typewriters to write their papers. It wasn't until the Dot-Com era was in full swing that the general public started to pay attention to computers and the Internet. Even then, though, many people of my generation and older smirked to refer to themselves as "Roadkill on the Information Superhighway." That only really disappeared around 2005 when social media started to take off.
So the point is, from the perspective of the general public there is a significant lag between when a transformative technology changes the world and when your average Joe wakes up to the fact that a revolution has already happened. I suspect it will be much the same with 3D printing, and the other significant, significant technologies that are birthing now such as wearable computing or implantable electronics, RFID or the "Internet of Things."
However in this case the real transformation is not technical, but psycho-social. Getting people to transform from the brain-dead, passive consumers they've been conditioned to be the past 100 years to the self-directed, creative makers 3D printing and these other technologies will enable them to be (at a lower barrier to entry than before, naturally), will take a lot longer than the 30 years it's taken the Information Revolution to get truly underway. That does mean early adopters will enjoy a significant, significant competitive advantage for a generation because now more than ever they can talk to other like minds via the Internet and multiply their native talents. And, now more than ever, they can say who gives a shit if Joe Sixpack next door doesn't get it? I can run circles around him before he even knows there's a race on.
Amid the totalitarian shadow of the NSA and the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the Powers-That-Be, it's the one thing that gives me hope for the future.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Not saying that food cant be printed, but it opens up an entire new problem with health regulations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Admit it. You're thinking of a dildo, aren't you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I can just imagine all the dildoes thiese things will be printing up.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.