Category Archives: News
Microsoft Confirms Plans to Take 3D Printing to the Masses at Inside 3D Printing Chicago
Software giant seeks to make 3D printing seamless for home use
In late June, during their annual Build Conference, Microsoft announced that Windows 8.1 would support 3D printing. This sparked many questions among people as to why Microsoft would get involved and how would they get involved. Jesse McGatha, a 14-year veteran at Microsoft, is one of the key people in charge of leading 3D printing innovation within the software giant.
Today, at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in Chicago, Mr. McGatha began his talk by addressing the question: Why would Microsoft be involved in 3D printing? He explained, “when you have over 70% of 3D printing already happening on a Windows operating system, it makes sense that Windows actually supports that.”
McGatha expressed that one of his main goals is to have an application that can talk to a server and can talk to a device in a clean and consistent way. Moreover, Microsoft will focus on the individual home consumer and on how to can make that user experience as simple and as seamless as possible. Microsoft wants to create a “consumer operating system that is available to everybody” that works fluidly with 3D printing.
Essentially, Microsoft is looking to make 3D printing a plug-and-play process. Now that the cost of 3D printers is becoming accessible for individuals to have at their home thanks to innovations from MakerBot, among others, it is important to have a PC operating system that makes it very simple for people to 3D print things.
Jesse McGatha showed the audience a sample user interface for how Windows 8.1 would interact with 3D printers (see gallery below). While the actual product might look different when it comes to market, the idea is to make the printing process very similar to how a user would go about printing a regular Word doc or PowerPoint presentation today. Some things as simple as having print queues and a print spooler are features Microsoft is tackling to make the user experience straightforward.
At the moment, 3D printing can be a tedious process that requires multiple different software packages and several programs to connect the computer to the 3D printers. The complex process can be a deterrent for the mass adoption of 3D printing technology in the household.
After listening to Mr. McGatha, it is obvious why Microsoft would jump into the industry to make it user friendly and help catalyze bringing 3D printers into people’s homes.
Authored by On 3D Printing contributor Rodrigo Garza Zorrilla, technology entrepreneur and advisor.
3D Printing Sparks Innovations in Art – MGX by Materialise at Inside 3D Printing Chicago
MGX by Materialise Leads the Charge in 3D Printing and Artist Collaboration
At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago, Joris Debo talked about a brave new art world pioneered by Materialise with their Mammoth Stereolithography 3D printing technology. Materialise is a Belgian based company that is involved in additive manufacturing (3D printing) in many industries like software development, rapid fit (automotive & aerospace), biomedical (CT & MRI scans) & orthodics among others. Debo is the Creative Director at MGX, which is the consumer goods division for Materialise and he is especially passionate about using 3D printing technology to “create objects that are both art and functional.”
MGX has become a company that closely works together with artists to come up with new pieces that would be very difficult and extremely labor intensive to make without 3D technology. Joris noted, “When I arrived in the company eight years ago, there were two people that were not engineers. Over the years, we’ve commissioned people, like Patrick Jouin, for a new era of digital aesthetics.”
MGX is in multiple collaborations with artists and fashion designers like Iris Van Herpen for example. Van Herpen has revolutionized fashion with mesmerizing futuristic designs that push the boundaries of art and fashion. In fact, a lot of her pieces are found in museums after they hit the runway. Debo notes how like Van Herpen, the “people that make these dresses are the new craftsmen.”
3D printing also allows the combination of traditional art with very high end furniture that matches the art. Joris pointed out how if you have a Jackson Pollock in your home and you want something to match the Jackson Pollock, an artist can custom create a piece or multiple pieces of furniture to match the Jackson Pollock using MGX’s 3D printing technology. Debo further noted how it’s “not only about 3D printing but about craftsmen that can finish the pieces.” This applies to pieces of furnitures, sculptures and even art replicas like museums have begun to use recently.
The Root Chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald
Joris discussed how art pieces or historical artifacts are sometimes too fragile to travel the world and thus insurance companies will not cover their repair if broken. Moreover, some artifacts, like King Tut’s mummy for example, are irreplaceable and is too risky to move regardless of the financial cost. To show King Tut’s mummy in New York City, National Geographic partnered with MGX in order to make a perfect replica that allowed people to feel they were actually looking at the real King Tut. These kinds of partnerships make it clear as to why museums like the Smithsonian is investing in 3D printing technologies that allow for their rare pieces from fossils to sculptures to be replicated. In sum, 3D printing technology is not only revolutionizing the industrial world, but it is already changing the aesthetics and culture around us, from clothing to furniture to historical artifacts and art pieces.
Authored by On 3D Printing contributor Rodrigo Garza Zorrilla, technology entrepreneur and advisor.
MakerBot and Stratasys Take Center Stage at the Inside 3D Printing Chicago Keynote
MakerBot and Stratasys Share a Vision for the Future of 3D Printing
Two industry giants, Scott Crump and Bre Pettis, lay out their vision.
Scott Crump, Chairman of the Board of Stratasys, and Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot, kicked off the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago this morning with an exciting vision of a future where 3D printing becomes a part of our daily life.
It all began in the late 80s, when Scott Crump wanted to make a toy frog for his daughter. Scott and his wife Lisa built the frog, and with it the first 3D printer, with little more than a glue gun and a toy plotter in their kitchen. A passion was born, and after the food started tasting like plastic, they moved the operation to the garage. In 1989, they patented the first FDM (fused deposition modeling) machine, or 3D printer. Today Scott Crump is Chairman of the Board and Chief Innovation Officer of Stratasys, the largest commercial 3D printer company in the world. With over 30,000 printers sold, Stratasys has a global presence and annual revenues of over $350 million. They currently produce over fifty five percent of the commercial 3D printers in the market.
“Welcome to Stratasys and welcome to a 3D world,” passionately stated Scott Crump, “where the only limitation is your own imagination.” Crump emphasized how it’s amazing that a toy froggy led to building an exoskeleton that allows a girl to have fully functional limbs. In addition to turning manufacturing on its head, 3D printing will have a positive impact on people’s lives. “The manufacturing revolution has started and it’s not changing slowly,” says Crump. “Stratasys looks forward to leading the way to a future where we will see millions of 3D printers from home to industrial use.”
Crump then introduced Bre Pettis, the co-founder and CEO of MakerBot, who spoke about his journey into the 3D printing world that has made these printers accessible to consumers. He mentioned that he and his co-founders Adam and Zach began playing with the idea of 3D printing in 2007 at the hacker space, NYC Resistor. By January 2009, they founded MakerBot, which has recently been acquired by Stratasys for $403 million. Much like Scott and Lisa Crump started in their kitchen, Pettis mentioned how they “started as three guys, a laser cutter and a dream.”
After speaking to friends that they saw a future where you could download objects, they came up with Thingiverse where the latest challenge is for someone to come up with a birdhouse to download. Thingiverse has just launched a customizer where people who don’t know what CAD stands for, can design their own iPhone case design. Pettis mentioned, “Consumers now live in a world where they don’t have to choose between two products,” they can make one for themselves. He set forth his favorite example of a toy train track that can be made functional through 3D printing.
Scott Crump and Bre Pettis emphasized that 3D printing is here to stay and will become ubiquitous in our lives.
Authored by On 3D Printing contributors Rodrigo Garza Zorrilla, technology entrepreneur and advisor, and Lisa M. Pérez, co-founder of Heart Design Inc.
3D Printing Startup Mixee Labs Launches Customizable 3D Printed Cufflinks
Mixee Labs Launches 3D Printed Cufflinks
Mixee Labs is the 3D printing startup behind customizable figurine platform Mixee Me and a customizable jewelry platform launched in June. Mixee Labs’ products were featured as Time Magazine’s Top 10 3D Printed Gifts of the year in 2012.
Now Mixee Labs has a new product: 3D printed cufflinks.
Using Mixee Labs, anybody can design their own cufflinks. You can select from a variety of different designs or even upload your own black and white graphic. Want cufflinks of your favorite team logo or your initials? Mixee Lab’s custom cufflink creator is perfect for you.
Mixee Labs manufactures each product on demand using 3D printed stainless steel (with optional gold or bronze plating) for $60, 3D printed sterling silver for $160, and 3D printed nylon plastic for $20.
3D printing is not limited to plastics, and Mixee Labs is taking full advantage of the wide variety of materials with this product. Each stainless steel or plastic pair will take about 2 weeks to print and ship; each silver pair will take about 3 weeks to ship.
Here’s a photo gallery to show how the creation process works and showcases some final cufflink designs.
We sat down with Nancy Yi Liang, co-founder of Mixee Labs for an interview.
On 3D Printing: First figurines, then jewelry, now cufflinks. Seems like you are building a full catalog of 3D printed goods. Tell us more about your expansion strategy.
Nancy Yi Liang: Eventually, we want to be a destination for customized, rapidly manufactured products. The cufflinks are built with our modeler’s platform (not yet released). The idea is you can upload a base model STL, like a cufflink, and specify a given surface for the user to add embellishments via extruded text or graphics. Unlike the Javascript platform we launched a while back, this platform doesn’t require a designer to know how to code.
On 3D Printing: These cufflinks are in stainless steel, right? What have you learned about working with that material?
Nancy Yi Liang: Stainless Steel is a great material–it has a real vintage-looking, raw quality to it. Moreover, you can coat it with gold and bronze, giving it some polish. A big part of designing for Stainless Steel is understanding structural strength. There’s a part of the 3d printing process (called the “greenstate”) where the model is not yet infused with bronze, and is actually quite fragile. During this stage, any thin parts of the model that is not well supported can break. In general, designing for 3d printing is very much about understanding the production process. “3d printing” actually covers a wide variety of production techniques (laser sintering, powder binding layer by layer with glue, jets extruding molten plastic). Each material employes different techniques and thus have different design restrictions. Shapeways provides excellent guides on designing for each material (hehe.. patting myself on the back a little since I wrote that section back when I was at Shapeways).
On 3D Printing: What’s been the biggest surprise about 3D printing jewelry and accessories?
Nancy Yi Liang: You know, sometimes people just want to put their names on things. I originally designed this with the mindset that people will want to upload all sorts of fancy graphics. But when I asked my friends who wear cufflinks, a lot of them got very excited when I told them that they can put their initials on the product. So ok, we added a custom text field to the cufflink creator. Right now, we are just beginning to venture into this space, so I’m sure there’s a lot more surprises coming down the road–we just need to keep our eyes and ears sharp!
Go to Mixee Labs to create your own custom cufflinks or other 3D printed jewelry.
3D Printed Spider is So Life-Like It’s Scary (Video)
3D Printed Spider is Guaranteed to Scare
T8 is a wirelessly controlled bio-inspired octopod robot made with high resolution 3D printed parts. It uses a total of 26 motors: 3 in each leg and 2 in the abdomen. It is powered by the Bigfoot™ Inverse Kinematics Engine which performs all of the necessary calculations for smoothly controlling the motions of the robot in real time.
For more information, visit http://www.robugtix.com
