MAD Skills in 3D Printing
It’s not hard to see the promise of 3D printers in a general way, but I don’t think I ever really grasped the full range and potential of this new technology until now. If you’re in manufacturing, you probably seized upon it right away for design and prototyping. Other businesses dove in to produce specialized components or custom parts in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. So far so good, but an hour in the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition “Out of Hand” showed me how much of this landscape I hadn’t seen.
My former limited perception of these new capabilities stemmed from an impression that 3D printers simply add layers in one direction and of one material. If each layer has to rest on the layer below, then the printed object is limited to some kind of tapering shape without cavities or concavities on more than one axis. Firstly, it’s clear those limitations if they ever existed have been handily overcome; secondly, the exhibition extends my restrictive definition of 3D printing to include not only additive, but subtractive systems (computer-numerically-controlled machining in the jargon) and digital weaving. When you put these things together the possibilities open up. The show included all kinds of shapes including flexible articles with interlocking pieces. But even with my original narrow view there turns out to be quite a bit you can do.
Personalization
Apparently the first thing that most people want to do is print their own special smartphone case or put their face on a Star Trek figurine. Far be it from me to spoil anyone’s fun, but Bespoke Innovations has gone a little further with their prosthetic leg coverings. Prosthetics are necessarily custom built, but the company’s Fairing product uses a scan of the good leg to create a cover that enhances the prosthetic both functionally and aesthetically. Then for those of us who are neither tweens nor amputees there are custom eyeglass frames – and given the cost of designer frames at the optometrist’s, this could be what wind’s up paying for your family’s home 3D printer.
Working On Different Scales
There’s many a slip ‘tween cup and lip, and the larger the cup or the more delicate the lip, the greater is the effective distance ‘twixt the two. 3D printing techniques allow precise machining of large objects to complex specifications. The example of a motorized vehicle almost wholly printed in one piece, the Rapid Racer by Stratasys (figure 1), suggests how manufacturing of things like cars might evolve. As well as reaping engineering benefits in strength and weight, you would be less likely to get a lemon if your car was printed in one piece from a tried and true design. But this is still modestly ambitious when compared to the exhibition’s model of a system that uses cement as its material to print a whole house.
Figure 1 – Rapid Racer by Stratasys
At the other end of the scale are printers that create structures at a microscopic level of definition. Consider the possibilities suggested by experiments with printing liver tissue. Not only does Organovo‘s artificial human tissue have therapeutic applications, it can be used to test the effect of new drugs without exposing a human test subject.
Creation of complex shapes
Electronic scanning and printing techniques make possible the creation of objects with intricate organic or geometric designs. The exhibition includes examples of elegant ball gowns and elaborate jewelry. I was struck by some examples of furniture, such as the beautiful coffee table in figure 2. It looks like a pond without banks or bottom and refracts the light like water. The marble “Cinderella” table (figure 3) is identical to one in MoMA’s collection made of birch wood.
Figure 2 – Liquid Glacial “Smoke” Coffee Table
One of the quirkier applications in the show was an exhibit called “Object Breast Cancer”. The artists, Abou Farman and Leonor Caraballo (working as carballo-farman), believe that “artistic interventions can have important social and psychological effects” and this led them to take MRI images of cancerous breast tumors and render them in metal as a brooch, pendant or sculpture.
Figure 3 – “Cinderella” Table
3D Photography
If a 2D picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a 3D image worth? This will put a lot of architect’s model makers out of work; but how much more vivid the urban planner’s scheme when overlaid on a model of the neighborhood. Or suppose you were a doctor preparing for brain surgery and you could print out the brain and offending tumors before the scalpel’s first stroke. As a mountaineer, it would be exciting to be able to print a model of the mountain before selecting a route.
The idea of being able to 3D-print a scanned object is pretty clearly appealing, since exhibition visitors were lining up to be scanned and printed themselves when I visited. The company running this demonstration, Shapeways, will send visitors a personal statuette for $30. I got in line myself, you know, for science. The six-inch figurine was made of a sandstone-like composite and, other than its slightly Voldemort nose, the likeness was sufficient to delight my wife.
If Instagram is fun with a photograph, consider the possibilities in 3D. Change the tones and textures and you have a completely new object. A limitation of the technology, at the moment, is that the scanner can’t reliably read reflective surfaces. The best scans come from non-shiny absorptive materials (maybe I should have powdered my nose before I got scanned). But this creates an interesting distortion of the object. A 3D-printed candelabra in the exhibition displays dramatic spikes showing where the light reflected on the original.
Representation of Non-Physical Entities
Just as a graph shows an intangible idea in a picture, 3D printing can represent all kinds of abstract ideas as a physical object. A sofa in the exhibition takes its shape from a pattern of brain waves. Another exhibit takes a visitor’s vocalization and converts the sound to a colorful geometric shape.
These aren’t just clever forms taking shape in interesting ways but have real world applications. Imagine a key fob made from the shape of a person’s voice. Say your name and now anyone with the same software can generate the image and match it to the key fob you’re carrying: a two-factor identification key in one.
I was using laser printers at work for about twenty years before I bought one for my home office. I’ll be surprised if it’s much more than five before a personal 3D printer is as common as today’s Blu-Ray player.
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