To hear enthusiasts tell it, the technique of additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, has the potential to change not just manufacturing, but the world.

3D printing today makes prototyping and manufacturing complex, custom objects simpler but tomorrow, everyone will have a 3D printer on their desk and make their own sneakers and hats.

3D printing is getting hyped right now, with a front page story in The Economist and a long article in the Times, but we actually think it is underhyped.

Even if it fails to meet some of the expectations of its boosters (and that's not a foregone conclusion), 3D printing will still probably become an enormous industry and have a tremendous impact on how we buy, sell and produce things.

What Is 3D Printing?

Technically, here's -- very roughly -- how 3D printing works: a big machine takes a raw material, today mostly plastics and some metals, and melts them into a microscopic layer. And then another layer. And then another layer. Until you end up with an actual object.

Thanks to 3D printing, to manufacture something today, you need only a printer, raw material, and software to tell the printer what to print. This is why it's a big deal: it's potentially the biggest change in how we make things since the invention of assembly lines made the modern era possible.

3D Printing Today

What does 3D printing look like today? According to several reports, the sale of 3D printers and associated services like software is already a billion dollar market. But nobody disputes that 3D printing is very far from a utopian 3D-printer-on-every-desk future.

Today most 3D printing technology uses too few materials, and is too crude in some ways, for most finished products we buy today.

Here's what people mostly use 3D printing for these days:

• Rapid prototyping. This was the early, and still the biggest business case for 3D printing. In plenty of industries from architecture to aerospace, the drawing board and computer screen only takes you so far. You need to build tangible prototypes to move forward. That used to be a big expense, and more importantly, a huge time-suck: there's no reason a designer should have to wait days for someone to make a prototype until they can move forward. With a 3D printer, designers can have a rough prototype quickly and be much more productive. The word "designers" is making it sound like it's a few guys in Brooklyn, but 3D printing is already changing the way we make buildings, cars and planes.
  
  
• Specialty manufacturing. 3D printing is already being used for finished products, but still in specific niches. Some industrial components that would be costly or complex to manufacture are already being 3D-printed. One exciting area with huge potential is prosthetics, where 3D printer allow highly customized prosthetics to be made.
  
  
• Hobbyists. One of the reasons why you hear about 3D printing is that there's a small but vocal and growing hobbyists community who enjoy making small doodads. The hobbyist component of 3D printing doesn't sound impressive, until you realize that the first people who cared about things like cars, planes and personal computers were hobbyists. 

3D Printing Tomorrow

We can all picture the an utopian 3D printing future: it would basically look like Star Trek, where replicators can make anything with a mere voice command. This is the "3D printer on every desk and in every home" scenario.

But even if that scenario doesn't pan out, 3D printing is going to be a huge industry because it's much more efficient than traditional manufacturing. The main reason is that the current way to manufacture things is to chip away at a block or sheets of raw material, whereas 3D printing adds raw material as needed. Current manufacturing processes create as much as 90% waste. So even if 3D printing is limited to the business world, it's going to be a huge industry.

And the printer in every home scenario isn't that far-fetched either -- only as far-fetched as "a computer in every home" was in 1975. Like any other piece of technology, 3D printers are always getting cheaper and better. 3D printers today can be had for about $5,000.

From Here To There

So, how do we get from here to there, what are the pitfalls, the opportunities and the big questions?

Today, 3D printers are too unreliable, slow, rough, and manufacturing large objects is cost-prohibitive. It's hard to build objects with high polish. But early cars were slow, dangerous, and notoriously unreliable.

The biggest difference between today's manufacturing and a 3D printing world is going to be the advent of mass customization. When each product is printed individually from software, there's never going to be a reason to buy something that looks like something someone else owns. Companies will have to change not just their manufacturing but their product lines, marketing and even business models.

A serious question is whether 3D printing will be a "jobless industry." History and economics teaches us that new industries often end up creating more jobs than they destroy, either directly (blacksmiths replaced by car repairmen) or indirectly through higher economic growth, but there's a not-insignificant chance that 3D printing might be an exception. To be sure, 3D printing will create many jobs: in a world where anyone can make and sell most kinds of items, many people will profit and create new industries. But it's not sure that these people will be more numerous than all the manufacturing jobs that will be lost.

Now Meet The Players

Who are the companies at the ground floor of this revolution? What sets them apart? What do they have in common?

3D Systems is one of the biggest makers of 3D printers

3D Systems makes many kinds of machines and software, but 3D printers are its biggest market segment. Smartly, it is tackling the customer market as well as the business market.

Autodesk makes the software that makes 3D printing possible

Autodesk makes all kinds of software used in industrial design, and is a leader in software for 3D printing. Before you can print anything, you need specialized software to design it, and Autodesk does that very well. Before she joined Yahoo, Carol Bartz was famous for leading Autodesk's turnaround while battling cancer.

Another publicly-traded industrial design software company going into 3D printing is Dassault Systemes.

Desktop Factory was Bill Gross' effort to make a sub-$5,000 3D printer

What does über-entrepreneur Bill Gross do when he's not waging war on Twitter or saving the Earth from global warming? The Idealab founder used 3D printing to prototype things for his other companies, saw the potential of 3D printing, and co-founded Desktop Factory with the goal of making sub-$5,000 3D printers. Unfortunately the company didn't make it and its assets were acquired by 3D Systems. Innovation is impossible without failure.

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Bre Pettis, a former schoolteacher, and his co-founders Adam Mayer and Zach Smith started MakerBot Industries in 2009 with the hope of making 3D printing more accessible.

They created a 3D desktop printer called the MakerBot. The company was an instant success and sold out of its first 20 MakerBots in just two weeks. Since then, users have created just about anything they could imagine with the device.

This past August the company raised $10 million to expand the MakerBot team and take its invention to the next level.

Pettis says there are many similarities between the personal computing industry and the personal manufacturing industry. He compares his machines to early personal computers like the Apple I.

We recently visited the famed MakerBot Botcave in Brooklyn to see how Pettis and his team are spearheading the personal manufacturing revolution.

Watch the video below to see for yourself.

Produced By Robert Libetti & Kamelia Angelova

Music: "I Am Running with Temporary Success from a Monstrous Vacuum in Pursuit" by Chris Zabriskie

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Bre Pettis profoundly believes that 3D printing can make the world a better place. And after talking to him, it's hard not to leave feeling the same way.

The key is how it lets you experiment in the physical world in the same way people do with software.

"You learn that it's okay to fail," he told us. "If a print gets screwed up, what have I lost? Just 25 cents worth of plastic, really."

Pettis is the cofounder of MakerBot, a 3D-printing startup based in Brooklyn. After receiving numerous awards and delivering three generations of its hobbyist 3D printer, the company is at the height of its game.

Usually reserved for elite manufacturing companies, 3D printers cost tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes even more) and take up loads of space. It's probably the last thing a private individual would want in his house.

But then you look at the Replicator, MakerBot's 3D printer for normal people. It's about the size of a microwave and costs less than $1,800. It even arrives at your house assembled, so you don't even need to be especially tech-savvy to use it.

Pettis and company have figured out how to make the 3D printer into a home appliance just like any toaster or coffee maker you already have. MakerBot represents a total democratization of manufacturing. We started to think, "Why doesn't everyone have one of these?"

MakerBot was kind enough to show us around its workspace in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. We were totally impressed.

The MakerBot Botcave is located in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

Here's Bre Pettis, cofounder of MakerBot

MakerBots run all day, making all kinds of different objects. Here's one in the middle of making a statuette

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The house of the future will be outfitted with hundreds of products created on 3-D printers, everything from jewelry and cups to home decor items and eventually more complex items like furniture or digital devices. It’s a future coming sooner than people think, said Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO of 3-D printing start-up Shapeways.

Fresh off $6.2 million in new funding for Shapeways, Weijmarshausen spoke with GigaOM about where 3-D printing is going, how it parallels the software industry and how far the technology can take us into the future. The New York startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, operates both a 3-D printing service and an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. It has now produced more than 1 million products to date and is the leading 3-D printing service available.

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3D printing was once a very expensive process. (Think tens of thousands of dollars.)

But lately the technology has become cheaper and consumerized thanks to companies like MakerBot, which sells 3D printers for as little as $1,800.

Don't miss our office tour of MakerBot's cool Brooklyn HQ >

So how does it work?

This handy infographic from HighTable breaks it all down. Click the image for a larger version:

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The claim that 3D printing is the next trillion dollar industry is backed up by the results of last month's Formula Student 2012, the annual event that challenges engineering students to build and race single-seat cars.

The Areion, entered by Belgian Group T, is not only the world's first car made almost entirely from 3D printed parts, it's really fast as well.

Weighing in at 617 lbs, according to Inhabitat, the Areion is heavier than most of the other cars competing on Germany's Hockenheim race circuit, but that did not stop it from accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in just four seconds and reaching a top speed of 88 mph.

3D printing is a remarkably flexible technology. It makes prototyping and manufacturing simpler and more accessible. It alleviates the need for economies of scale. The success of the Areion is compelling evidence 3D printing can be applied to the automotive industry.

Group T, from International University College Leuven near Brussels, used Mammoth stereolithography machines built by Materialise, to produce parts as large as the Areion's entire body. They added an electric drive train, and just three weeks after establishing an initial design, they had a car that was ready to race.

In the future, you'll be able to think up a car and print it out.

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This weekend, in New York, tinkerers and hackers assembled to trade tips and show off their latest tricks at the World’s Maker’s Faire. This is only the latest in a series of events that are showcasing radical changes in the world of manufacturing.

Proto-printing

Hacker spaces are nothing new. Since the beginning of the computer era, there have been spaces around the country where software and hardware hackers have been getting together to experiment with new technologies. Over the last few years, those spaces have increasingly counted computer-controlled CNC machines and 3D printers.

And along with an increase in the availability of those machines, the concept of monthly-membership hackerspace has slowly taken a foothold in many cities, allowing for anyone with an idea for a new product to create a prototype.

Once the prototype has been created, going from prototype to product becomes a question of figuring out how to finance the next step.

Proto-selling

With the rise of Kickstarter as a platform, the way products are built and delivered has radically changed. Today, an inventor with an idea and a basic prototype can put together a set of marketing materials and sell a product long before the details of how to create the product at scale have been solved.

Take, for example, a couple of recent fundraising successes on Kickstarter: Last May, Pebble sold over 60,000 copies of a watch that existed only as a concept. Then, in August, Ouya sold a new videogame console to another 60,000 people. Neither product has been delivered. In fact, neither product is ready for production yet. But through the magic of becoming a backer, the new process for product creation can now be launched by anyone with a simple idea and a prototype.

This new approach to selling hardware is changing the established rules of manufacturing. In the past, companies did research in whether a market might work, created a new product, then put it in shops and crossed their fingers. If everything went right, the products would succeed and the money spent on R&D and the initial production run would be recovered. If things went wrong, the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars spent on that initial offering would be written off.

But in the new world of backer-supported development, anyone with an idea and a prototype can test out demand for a product before even producing the first complete production-ready model. By putting together a set of marketing material in a kickstarter campaign, new product makers can pre-sell products months before they are available.

In today’s new manufacturing world, products no longer need to exist in order to be sold and all the details of making something go from prototype to product can be worked out after commitments have been made on selling a product.

The distributed corporation

But once a product has been pre-sold, it still needs to get built and the skills to take a product from prototype to production-ready are often spread across multiple disciplines.

Companies have two choices in terms of developing the rights set of capabilities to produce products at scale: they can either hire full-timers as employees or they can figure out a way to contract the work out.

Between contract manufacturers and companies like odesk that allow you to find consultants either on an hourly or per-project basis. This means that capabilities like finding the right type of plastic to get certain color of material or figuring out ways to integrate cheaper components to maximize profits without decreasing quality is only a few computer clicks away.

Corporations have been outsourcing jobs for many decades but these capabilities are now available to individuals a very low cost, making it possible for an individual to launch a new hardware-based company at a fraction of what was possible in the past.

A new age of manufacturing

Recently, Marc Andreessen, a pioneer of the internet who has had an amazing ability at figuring out what the next big trends are, declared that “software will eat the world.” And when you look at the different industries that have been displaced by the rise of software-based solutions, it is increasingly clear that software has already eaten a large part of the service industry.

But what about hardware? Can software have an impact on how physical goods are been created a distributed? If you think about how the supply chain is being disrupted by the trends I just highlighted above, you may seen the beginning of a new post-mass production world, where hardware is manufactured by smaller productions lines and in smaller batches.

And a lot of hardware is now first generated as computer models that are fed into CNC machines and 3D printers. So the line between the virtual and the physical is getting increasingly thin and the way in which physical production lines work can also be increasingly automated.

Think, for example, of the recent achievement by NASA when it managed to get a completely software-driven robot to perform the impossible tasks of navigating from space into a safe landing zone on Mars without any human intervention. For 20 minutes, the Mars lander performed a set of pre-programmed actions in an acrobatic ballet that made it possible to land a vehicle roughly the size of a small car without a single issue.

If software can accomplish such an amazing feat, it is only one small leap of faith away to assume that we could get to the point where just-in-time production of a single object on a CNC machine would be based on software runs and the ability to effectively create single-object on a product line in a cost efficient manner.

In these trends, we could see the seed for the rebirth of a light manufacturing industry, with productions lines being located closer to distribution and consumption center.

3D printing, a trend that has yet to make its way into the mainstream, sits very strongly at the center of the maker’s movement. And it is the last key to building a society where goods are created in small batches, with no need to do large wasteful run. I’d venture that within the next 5–10 years, we will see neighborhood stores pop-up where you will be able to order a good online and pick it up or have it delivered a few minutes later.

Today, 3D printers are mostly building tools in plastic composites but some innovators are making it possible to build things in other materials. Innovators like Shapeways are building have been making it possible to print things in metal, ceramics and more and they are doing it only a few miles away from where the Maker’s Faire is being held. Meanwhile, at Maker’s Faire itself, Brooklyn-based Makerbot will be showcasing its new 3D  printer.

So this week, the future of manufacturing will be on showcase. If you’re in New York city, you should make your way to the Maker’s Faire this weekend and see that future. And if you’re not, you should get ready for the revolution to come to you. It may be sitting on the edge today but it’s getting closer.

And soon, it will be on your street corner.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The new industrial revolution. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

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The similarities between the early era of personal computing and the current state of 3D printing are huge.

When personal computing was in its salad days in the late 1970s, it was a fringe interest for weirdos with beards. While it had its share of true believers who envisioned a world with a computer in every home and school, there were just as many skeptics asking the question, "What is this and who is it for?"

Now 3D printing seems to be going through the same thing.

A 3D printer is a machine that builds physical objects bit by bit, layer by layer—similar to how inkjet printers lay down colors on a piece of paper, but in three dimensions. Commercial versions of such a device can cost tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars, but devoted hobbyist groups have continuously tinkered and optimized the device, reducing the cost to less than $2,000 (and in one case, just a mere $400).

So we have a very expensive and exclusive device normally reserved for large businesses starting to pop up in people's homes. No one's quite sure what it's good for, but a few believers see the potential for a general-purpose creative device.

See the similarities?

The man leading the charge seems to be Bre Pettis of MakerBot. His company introduced the MakerBot Cupcake in March 2009. Now, three and a half years later, MakerBot is selling its fourth generation of printer. Pettis is on the cover of Wired.

Smaller companies such as Printrbot have sprung up in MakerBot's wake—in fact, the New York Maker Faire included a designated area called the 3D Printer Village for these companies to showcase their products.

The market for 3D printers in the home is still pretty niche. Tinkerers use them to create custom parts for other homebrewed creations. A site called Thingiverse, also maintained by Pettis's MakerBot, serves as a popular community for users to exchange 3D object files.

That exchange may be crucial for 3D printing to go mainstream.

In 1979, spreadsheet software VisiCalc legitimized personal computers as a serious business tool. The mainstreaming of 3D printers will occur when people realize they can print doorstops and shower curtain rings, when they realize that owning a 3D printer means no longer having to drive to the store to buy something manufactured in China, put on a boat, loaded into a truck, and dropped on a shelf.

A small group of tinkerers launched personal computing. But people who didn't want to write their own code are the ones who turned it into a mass market. As Steve Jobs put it, "the computer for the rest of us."

When 3D printer makers create a make-anything machine for the rest of us, it's just a matter of time before there's one in every home and school.

Don't miss: 11 Crazy Things You Can Make With A MakerBot >

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We could one day stop an epidemic in its tracks by downloading a file and printing our own vaccines, avoiding a Contagion-like epidemic, if Craig Venter's vision of the future comes to pass.

Venter discussed his 3D printer for synthetic organisms, which would be similar to today's 3D printers, which use special materials to produce three dimensional products in your home from a downloaded blueprint. In the case of the life printer, the cartridges would hold chemicals like DNA base pairs, the building blocks of genes. 

Ventner presented his ideas at the Wired Health Conference today. He calls it a "digital biological converter," or "teleporter."

Venter, the high-profile geneticist and synthetic biologist who is best known for heading the first group to sequence a full human genome, founded several research centers including the J. Craig Venter Institute, where he now works.

His group there is testing out scenarios in which they have less than 24 hours to build a vaccine that could be disseminated with a file sent to the life-printing machine. Then, the printed vaccine could be injected to produce immunity to the virus in question, stopping an epidemic in its tracks.

Obviously, the idea is still in the pilot phases, and there will need to be hefty regulation surrounding any way it would be introduced into the public, so people can't go printing their own viruses and bacteria, and so people won't be getting spam vaccines.

"Regulation will be an interesting aspect of this," Venter said in his presentation. "We get a lot of spam e-mail. People making fake drugs and selling them for profit. It’s a nasty world out there."

(Via WiredScience)

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A group of MIT researchers making the first affordable, laser-equipped 3D printer have raised $2.8 milion dollars on Kickstarter.

That's a new record for the crowdfunding site, beating the previous record of $2.4 milion held by Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset.

The researchers call their company Formlabs. They started the Kickstarter project to bring Form 1, their 3D printer, into production. The prototype has already been built. They were hoping to raise $100,000 from Kickstarter supporters, who chip in various amounts in exchange for either recognition or early access to the product.

3D printing is a new form of manufacturing that lets you build complete products, layer by layer, similar to how inkjet printers lay down colors on a piece of paper, but in three dimensions.

There's lots of competition to build affordable 3D printers. You can buy a MakerBot right now for about $2,200. But what's making people go gaga for Form 1 is its novel technology.

Form 1 uses stereolithography, relying on a laser to form really thin layers. That's the most accurate method for 3D printing. Until now, it needed expensive, high-end optical technology, making the printers cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Form 1 hasn't announced its retail pricing yet, but presumably it will be in line with MakerBot, since the entry level to get one through Kickstarter is a pledge of $$2,299. That level is sold out, by the way, although there are still some packages at the $2,699 level available. You'll need to hurry if you want in on that. The Kickstarter project ends tomorrow at 8:45 Eastern.

Formlabs expects to deliver its first batch of Form 1 printer to its sponsors by February.

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3D printing is a process by which a machine shapes plastic into an object by laying down plastic one layer at a time.

The potential here is huge – any object you can design using computer software can come to life in the real world as a physical object. A number of 3D printing companies have sprung up with the goal of making this technology both affordable and accessible to whomever wants it.

Massachusetts-based Formlabs began a Kickstarter project seeking $100,000 to bring to market the Form-1, its new 3D printer design. It ended up clobbering that goal, finally raising $2.9 million.

We spoke with Formlabs cofounder Maxim Lobovsky to get his take on why the project ended up being such a home run.

"There was an unmet need," he said. "Professional 3D printers at the high end run tens of thousands of dollars. The low-end equipment is more affordable but less than professional. There was a huge hole in between to satisfy with architects, jewelers, and other professionals in that middle ground who can make use of 3D printing."

The current batch of affordable hobbyist 3D printers carry out their process by means of plastic extrusion–plastic is melted and laid out very precisely one layer at a time until a fully-formed 3D object takes shape. Formlabs decided to take an entirely different approach.

"We use a photochemical process called stereolithography," they said. "We hit liquid resin with a wavelength of light. It polymerizes and hardens, but this has nothing to do with heat. It's an extremely precise laser that traces out objects to within 5 microns of precision."

Stereolithography is one of the oldest forms of 3D printing technology, but Formlabs seems to have improved on a classic. The Form-1 was engineered to have as few moving parts as possible and the team took efforts to keep the price low–for example, the blue laser that hardens the liquid is the same as the readily-available laser in consumer Blu-Ray players.

They told us, "3D printers work fine when they cost $100,000, so we wanted to bring that price down."

The most obvious parallels are to the early days of the PC industry. Where mainframe computers of the 1970s are like the super-expensive 3D printers of today, the first Macintosh is like the Form-1, a device that fits on your desk but still carries out all the functionality of its larger, pricier counterpart.

"The first PCs didn't go to homes. They went to businesses," Formlabs told us. "We tend to see that as the parallel to what we're doing here." And this obviously doesn't exclude other 3D printing companies. Brook Drumm of Printrbot and Bre Pettis of Makerbot each chipped in for a Form-1 of their own.

For the immediate future, Formlabs plans to deliver products to its Kickstarter backers and hopes to make them "very happy."

The larger mission after that is to prove that there's far more demand for 3D printing than has been realized, and if a Form-1 3D printer should end up on every single engineer's desktop in the process, they can certainly consider that a mission accomplished.

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CONFIRMATION as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came on November 20^th when GE Aviation, part of the world’s biggest manufacturing group, bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies.

This is a small precision-engineering firm employing 130 people in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio.

Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines.

Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer. Among the 3D printing technologies used by Morris Technologies is laser sintering. This involves spreading a thin layer of metallic powder onto a build platform and then fusing the material with a laser beam. The process is repeated until an object emerges. Laser sintering is capable of producing all kinds of metal parts, including components made from aerospace-grade titanium.

One of the attractions of printing parts is that it saves material. Instead of machining components from solid billets of metal, in which much of it may be cut away, only the material that is needed to shape the part is used. Printed parts can also be made lighter than forged parts, which promises fuel savings.

Many manufacturers already use 3D printing to make prototypes of parts, because it is cheaper and more flexible than tooling up to produce just one or two items. But the technology is now good enough for it to be used to make production items too.

Among the components that Morris Technologies plans to print will be some used in the LEAP jet engine (pictured), which is being developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Snecma of France. The LEAP engine is scheduled to enter service in the next few years on a number of short-haul airliners. More than 4,000 engines have already been ordered.

GE is buying Morris Technologies (which includes a sister company, Rapid Quality Manufacturing) for an undisclosed sum. GE sees the purchase as an investment in an important new manufacturing technology. “Our ability to develop state of the art manufacturing processes for emerging materials and complex design geometry is critical to our future,” said Colleen Athans, general manager of GE Aviation’s supply-chain operations.

Some people think additive manufacturing will overturn many of the economics of production because it pays no heed to unit labour costs or traditional economies of scale. Designs can be quickly changed, so the technology enables flexible production and mass customisation.

The GE deal is further evidence for those who believe that product innovation will increasingly go hand-in-hand with manufacturing innovation. So proximity of production and R&D will matter more. With GE Aviation based just outside Cincinnati, the firms are almost neighbours.

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Defense Distributed, an organization offering designs for guns that can be manufactured at home using increasingly cheap devices known as 3D printers, will likely start testing prototypes before the end of the year.

The Texas-based group, which has applied for nonprofit status and describes itself as "organized for charitable and literary purposes," has already created three designs for printable guns.

The plan is for everyday people to be able to download those schematics and then print their own gun using a 3D printer. 

3D printers work in different ways, but the most common kinds apply layers of plastic resin to create a fully formed, three-dimensional object.

All the group needs is a federal firearms license, which its cofounder Cody Wilson expects to obtain within the next two or three weeks.

"We're sitting on the logistics, time, resources and money," Wilson told Alexander Hotz of The Guardian. "We're just waiting on a little piece of paper."

But it hasn't been an easy journey for the organization. 

Back in September, Indiegogo, a fundraising website, froze the group's Wiki Weapon project and forced them to return the nearly $2,000 raised to the donors. But that didn't stop them from taking contributions.

The group secured the funding it needed by taking donations through Bitcoins, a digital currency. But it hit another snafu in October when 3D printing company Stratasys took back the 3D printer it had leased to Defense Distributed, citing the group's lack of a license to manufacture firearms. 

But something doesn't sound right about that.

The whole point of 3D printing is that anyone can become a manufacturer.

So will everyone who downloads Defense Distributed's designs need to apply for a federal license?

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By now you've probably heard about Defense Distributed, a Texas organization that aims to distribute files for making firearms on professional-grade 3D printers.

The group also intends to scale these designs down to the point that they can be printed on cheaper hobbyist printers like MakerBot and Printrbot.

It is currently illegal in the United States to make a weapon that the National Firearms Act would identify as a "firearm" without a tax payment and ATF permission. This stands in stark contrast to what Defense Distributed says on its site, maintaining that it's perfectly legal.

We're sure people will debate the legalities. We're more interested in a different question.

How moral is it to give people the means to cheaply manufacture their own real weapons that fire real bullets?

There are those who will argue it's a moral imperative, that the country's going to hell in a handbasket and it's up to us to take it back. This attitude permeates Defense Distributed's website, with lines such as "The firearm has place of pride in underlining an individual’s significance as a moral agent," and "Firearm rights are human rights."

This strikes me as a bunch of self-righteous bloviating. Being born doesn't entitle you to own a gun any more than it entitles you to drive a car—you get to do so after earning a license. I've always thought of them as gun "privileges" instead of gun "rights."

Lest you think I'm some die-hard lefty, let me be clear—I have no issue with guns. Have you ever fired one? It's awesome. I totally get the reasons for owning them and using them appropriately.

I think printing your own gun is perfectly fine, no more or less moral than buying a new one. But it's the act of indiscriminately distributing the plans to do so that seems wrong and dangerous.

If Defense Distributed successfully designs a working firearm, it's been very clear that it will make the plans freely available over the internet to whoever wants them. 3D printers are only getting better and more affordable. Once only available to professionals, they're now readily available to tinkerers, hobbyists, and dads. Anyone with a 3D printer and some ABS plastic will be able to own a gun regardless of his criminal history or psychological stability. These guns will be unregulated, off the grid, easily copied, and just as easily disposed of.

I'm all for 3D-printed guns, but I'm also for safety. Until Defense Distributed can figure out how to be a little more discriminating with who gets the weapon plans, I think the moral thing to do is to hold off.

I can't help but think that guns don't need to be more available in the country.

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Building on its commitment to education, Printrbot has launched a campaign on the Kickstarter fundraising site to help bring its 3D printers to schools and consumers at the same time.

3D printers are devices which create physical objects from digital designs by laying down layer after layer of material, most typically a plastic resin.

With a pledge of $700 or more, you'll get two Printrbot Jr. 3D printers. The idea is to keep one for yourself and give the other to a school, circumventing all the bureaucracy and funding that a school would normally have to navigate to purchase a printer on its own.

When we talked to him in the past, founder Brook Drumm said that the Printrbot Jr. is his favorite model of printer because it's small enough to carry around in a backpack and can run on its own battery power.

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Staples, the ubiquitous office supply store and print shop, will expand to offer in-store 3D printing services, reports The Register.

The service will be called "Staples Easy 3D." Customers will upload a 3D object file from their home computers, then pick up the completed object at a store or arrange to have it shipped.

So now Staples isn't just about photocopies and Christmas cards. It will be about physical objects in the real world, only further bringing 3D printing into the mainstream.

One question: will Staples let you use its service to print guns?

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The following is an excerpt from Chris Anderson's upcoming book "Makers," and appears here with permission, Copyright (c) Chris Anderson, 2012. Published by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

One recent Saturday, my two youngest daughters decided they wanted to redecorate their dollhouse. They’ve been playing The Sims 3, which is a video game that’s basically a virtual dollhouse where you can make any kind of home with a dizzying array of furniture and people choices (“Sims”), and then watch them live their lives in it.

One daughter did her Sims house in modern “career girl” style, with a home gym and AV room. The other went more 1960s style, with stream- lined appliances, mod furniture, and an angular swimming pool.

Once their “screen time” was over, they wanted to continue play- ing out the theme with their real dollhouse. This is a sign of children brought up in the digital world, where anything is possible and everything is available. There are hundreds of furniture options available in The Sims. Why settle for anything less in the physical world?

But things don’t always work that way in real life. Or at least not yet.

Their first instinct, of course, was to come to me and ask me to buy new furniture for them. And my own first instinct (after saying “no” and “wait for your birthday”) was to at least find out what was avail- able. I went online and quickly realized three things: (1) dollhouse furniture is expensive; (2) there is surprisingly little variety; and (3) the stuff your kids like is invariably the wrong size for your dollhouse. Sorry, girls.

At that point, to my delight, they asked if we could make the furniture ourselves. My pleasure in their DIY spirit was slightly tem- pered, however, by memories of how projects started together with kids typically end up hours later with Dad in the workshop alone cursing broken bits of wood and X-Acto knife cuts. And even if I were to persevere, a week-long process of micro-carpentry would proba- bly end up, if history is any guide, with my clumsy bit of misshapen wood being placed in the dollhouse’s attic, unable to compete with the store-bought stuff on the other floors.

But now we have a 3-D printer, a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, and so this quest ended differently. We went to Thingiverse, an online repository of 3-D designs that people have uploaded. And there it was, just like The Sims. Every furniture type we could want, from French Renaissance to Star Trek, was available, ready for the downloading. We grabbed some exquisite Victorian chairs and couches, resized them with a click to perfectly fit our dollhouse scale, and clicked on “build.” Twenty minutes later we had our furniture. It was free, fast, and there was so much more choice than in the real world, or even on Amazon. We may never buy dollhouse furniture again.

If you’re a toy company, this story should give you chills.

As I was writing this, Kodak went into bankruptcy, a victim of the shift away from film that needed to be bought and processed to digital photography, which is free and can be printed at home on desktop inkjet printers. If you’re making cheap plastic toys today, can you see a premonition of your future in that?

Of course, physical objects are more complex than 2-D images. Right now we can print plastic in only a few colors on our MakerBot. The finish is not as good as injection-molded plastic, and we can’t print color details with nearly as fine precision as the painting ma- chines or stencils of Chinese factories.

But that’s because we’re at the dot-matrix equivalent of 3-D print- ers. Remember them, from the 1980s? They were noisy, monochrome, and crude—tiny pins hitting a black ink ribbon, little more than an automated electric typewriter. But today, just a generation later, we have cheap and silent inkjets that print in full color with resolution almost indistinguishable from professional printing.

Now fast-forward the clock a decade or two from today’s early 3-D printers. They will be fast, silent, and able to print a wide range of materials, from plastics to wood pulp and even food. They will have multiple color cartridges, just like your inkjet, and be able to print in as many color combinations. They will be able to print images on the surface of an object even finer than the best toy factories today. They may even be able to print electronic circuits right into the object itself. Just add batteries.

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The tech industry cheerleads the displacement and reconfiguration of huge institutions like the music industry and telecoms. The arms industry shares many of the attributes of those industries, and is poised for fundamental change that is much like the changes they have experienced. If the product of the arms industry were not arms, the inevitable upheaval would be anticipated and prophesied with glee by the usual pundits (this website included).

It’s not, because the general availability of weapons is not something we as a community can agree on as an unmitigated good. For that matter, even free speech and assembly are by no means goals universally agreed upon. But advances in technology are providing all of these things, regardless of the preferences of any one group.

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We've previously reported on Defense Distributed, an organization that seeks to design and print fully-functional guns using 3D printers and share the digital files for them so others can do the same.

We don't like this idea one bit. It turns out that a heavyweight in the 3D printing world doesn't like it either.

Thingiverse is an online repository for people to share digital files that can be used to render objects in the real world using a 3D printer.

Now CNET reports that Thingiverse is removing files that could be used to produce firearms. It removed a file that could be used to produce  a gun's lower receiver.

Thingiverse's terms of service already give it the right to remove any material that could be used to create a weapon, but a company representative told CNET that "[w]e reserve the right (but have no obligation) to review any User Content, investigate, and/or take appropriate action against you in our sole discretion if you violate the Acceptable Use Policy..."

And consider the shooting in Connecticut – Makerbot's attorney Richard McCarthy added that "[r]ecent events served as the impetus here to take immediate action (and there were several) and reiterate or emphasize the site's focus on creative empowerment for products that have a positive impact."

Finally some sense.

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Peter Weijmarshausen runs Shapeways, an innovative manufacturing company that has been around since 2007. 

Shapeways is unique because it uses 3D printing to allow anyone to create a custom-designed product ranging from art, jewelery, iPhone cases, trinkets, toys, cuff links, mugs, and anything else you can imagine. 

If you really like your creation, you can use Shapeways to sell it to anyone you like. Think of it as Etsy for people who make their stuff using 3D printers.

"We enable people to basically open up their own little company. They can design and test their products and bring them mainstream," Weijmarshausen told Business Insider in an interview.

Shapeways has produced over 1 million 3D printed products and there are currently over 8,000 Shapeways shops in existence.

It's surprising that with more than 6 billion product variations that Shapeways' production process isn't extremely complicated.

In fact, the way Shapeways works is simple, Shapeways sets a production cost, and you can mark it up as much as you want and that sets the final price. Depending on the material, customers will receive their items within 10-15 business days. Shapeways even ships your product to customers for you and at the end of the month you get all the profits your item made. Shapeways will always charge you the same price if you want to sell your item or not. 

Weijmarshausen says that people are unhappy with mass-produced goods and that consumers want to be involved in the design process allowing intimate customization and personalization to the products they buy. 

Shapeways' 60-person workforce isn't trying to simply bring 3D printing capabilities to the mainstream, it is trying to change the way manufacturing works.

The amount of users already taking advantage of Shapeways is a testament to the model working. "We are enabling almost a quarter of million people to make their own products. we are definitely growing quickly," Weijmarshausen said.

The following is a lightly edited conversation Business Insider had with Weijmarshausen where he discusses 3D printing and how Shapeways is different from the rest.

Business Insider: Do you think the average person should care about 3D printing and why?

Peter Weijmarshausen: Yes and no. I do not think that we should talk to much about the technology because in the end what you're getting is this beautiful item. Do we really care if a gift is 3D printed or not? I do think we should understand that this new type of tech is working. I think that Shapeways is an advancement in personalized gifts. I am more passionate about the end results.

In the past, starting a company around a physical product was hard, you needed to have a good idea, you had  to patent that idea, then find a manufacturer, get loans, find retail channels and then sell it and hope that you sell it all. 

With Shapeways the concept of starting a business has changed. Entrepreneurs can come up with an idea, model it, test it, start a shop on Shapeways free of charge, and have immediate access to a lot of customers. We don't care if you make one, 10, or 1000. We see more and more small businesses using Shapeways in this exact way.

BI: What does Shapeways have planned for 2013?

PW: One of the very important things that we found is materials. We already have over 30 different types of materials from the widest varieties including plastics, stainless steel, silver, ceramics, and more in all kinds of colors and finishes. 

In 2013 we want to bring even more materials to our customers. We also want to improve the quality of these materials too. Next to that, I think our website can always be improved so that we can get users the features they want so it'll be easier to understand and anybody who wants to get a product they care about can get it.

We also just announced a factory in Long Island City. Shapeways 3D printing brings manufacturing back into the city making it local. we can manufacture our products in the USA and close to our customers. Building out this factory for us is very important. It cuts our costs allowing us to share the savings with the community. I don't believe that we should make stuff on one side of the world and then ship it back here.

As we grow, we're going to open more factories and bring things back local using high tech manufacturing.

BI: Do you see companies like MakerBot as competition or allies?

PW: Definitely not competition. I think the home printer is an amazing marketing tool lots of people to get into 3D printing just like with the home paper printer. At home you can print in any color you want but you can't necessarily get all of the materials you might want to use. 

A lot of people prototype at home then use Shapeways for higher quality materials. I also think that having a home printer is definitely for the tech savvy. Its not for everyone yet so again people see the home 3D printer and they're amazing but this is where we come in.

That's why we want to make the use of 3D printers as easy as possible enabling people to make products instead of simply using 3D printers.

Learn More About 3D Printing: 11 Crazy Things You Can Make With A MakerBot >

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