Tag Archives: Inside 3D Printing
MakerBot Store in NYC Visit: 3D Printers, Digital Scanners, and More
MakerBot Store in NYC Drives 3D Printer Sales
This past week at the Inside 3D Printing conference, the On 3D Printing team was invited to a special event at the MakerBot Store in NYC, along with other industry press.
We asked MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis what’s the next big thing he’s working on? He answered immediately, “3D scanners.” MakerBot announced its Digitizer product at SXSW and has a booth where you can digitize your own head. We gave it a try and our 3D printed profile is on order. See the photo below of one of the visitors scanning his head in the booth.
MakerBot’s motivation to open the store is to give potential customers a chance to see 3D printing in action. Does it increase sales of printers? “Absolutely,” one of the MakerBot employees told us. There is a certain magic to seeing a 3D printed robot or digitized head. You can immediately imagine what you might 3D print yourself.
We met some great entrepreneurs at the event as well, including the founder of Square Helper who prints his products on MakerBot 3D printers.
Below is a photo gallery from our visit.
Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York – A Retrospective
Inside 3D Printing Conference
In a context that felt a bit like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this week 3D printing went to New York for the first ever Inside 3D Printing Conference. Over two full days at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, a broad array of industry leaders, innovators, academics and analysts gave keynotes, led seminars, and showed off their latest products to over 3,000 conference attendees. For many in the crowd, this was a crash course on a technology that has been exploding in the public consciousness over the past two years, and for others it was a chance to network, hear from big names in the industry, and get a sense for where 3D printing will go next.
In a role that seemed fitting given his company’s leadership in the industry and status as the conference’s primary sponsor, 3D Systems CEO Avi Reichental opened the conference with the declaration, “Complexity is free” in a 3D printed world. Never before, he underlined, has a manufacturing process been indifferent to geometric complexity, and to him this is the single biggest reason 3D printing will continue to grow and expand into sectors ranging from education to medical devices to automotive and aerospace.
Much of the conference’s focus was on these different segmentations of 3D printing, and breakout seminars throughout the two days took a deeper dive in a variety of subjects. Some of the more memorable seminars explored integrating 3D printers into K-12 education, topology optimization – a complex but very impressive design tool that appears to be a perfect match for 3D printing, consumer desktop and cloud 3D printing, and bioprinting human tissue for medical applications. Longtime industry analyst Terry Wohlers and Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen also gave keynote addresses highlighting their vision for the industry’s future.
3D Printed iPhone Case from Sculpteo
Outside the seminar room the conference also had a distinctly hands-on element. A bustling exhibit hall hosted dozens of booths showing off a variety of consumer and enterprise 3D printers along with more curious technologies like 3D scanners and novel CAD input devices. 3D printing service companies were also eager to engage with potential customers, showing high quality parts available for remote ordering online.
While many sides of the industry were highlighted at the inaugural Inside 3D Printing Conference this week, the underlying theme was very clear: while 3D printing technology may have existed in research labs and niche applications since the 1980s and ‘90s, it is only now beginning to truly change our lives in meaningful ways. And from the number of times speakers said “Nascent,” “Just the first inning,” or “Only scratching the surface” to describe the state of the industry, it is clear that insiders see the eventual impact that 3D printing will make on the world to be profound, far-reaching, and on a larger scale than most casual observers can imagine today.
Authored by Brian H. Jaffe, founder of Mission St. Manufacturing and contributor to On 3D Printing.
Inside 3D Printing Conference: Day 2 Top Stories
Inside 3D Printing Conference: Day 2
Day 2 of the Inside 3D Printing Conference was exciting and informative. Below are the top stories from the day. (If you haven’t read it yet, here is our recap of Day 1.)
Topology Optimization in Additive Manufacturing: 3D Printing Conference (Part 5)
Topology optimization, a process inspired by bone structure research done over a century ago, is explained by solidThinking designers.
Shapeways Funding: $30 Million from Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon to Join Board
New Shapeways funding! Shapeways announced a new round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Partner Chris Dixon will join the Shapeways board.
Sculpteo Cloud 3D Printing, iPhone Cases, and More – 3D Printing Conference (Part 6)
Sculpteo is a 3D printing marketplace that is innovating on 3D printing services. We spoke with them at the Inside 3D Printing conference in NYC.
3D Printing in K-12 Education: Virginia Leads the Way – 3D Printing Conference (Part 7)
The Commonwealth Engineering and Design Academy in Virginia looks to integrate 3D printing to revolutionize K-12 education.
Shapeways CEO: Become a Creator of the Products You Care About – 3D Printing Conference (Part 8)
Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen delivers an update on his company at the Inside 3D Printing Conference, fresh off of a new round of funding.
Shapeways CEO: Become a Creator of the Products You Care About – 3D Printing Conference (Part 8)
Shapeways CEO Gives an Update on His Company
Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO and co-founder of Shapeways, a leading consumer facing 3D printing service company, started his keynote address today at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York with the question, “What do you really want?” He went on to explain that the problem with mass manufacturing is forcing individual consumers to buy products that are identical to what other people buy, even though everyone has unique preferences. To illustrate this point he showed a picture of a custom car. “This is a labor of love, and extremely costly,” he said, pointing to the picture. 3D printing, on the other hand, makes customization easy. And that makes it a very valuable service.
Shapeways Growth
So far it appears that Mr. Weijmarshausen is correct, as Shapeways is growing fast, and planning to grow even faster in the future. Last year the company hosted Mayor Michael Bloomberg to open a new factory on Long Island, and just today it announced an additional $30 million in venture capital funding. However, Mr. Weijmarshausen prefers touting slightly different metrics. Today Shapeways has over 10,000 designers and over 300,000 community members that submit and purchase 60,000 new designs every month.
Yet it is not just the ability to upload and purchase designs that excites the people at Shapeways. As shown in a brief demo of the ‘sake set creator’ app, the real vision is for consumers to be able to customize template designs in user-friendly applications. Today it might be something as simple as a coffee cup or a lampshade, but Shapeways believes this is just the beginning.
The Future of 3D Printing
When asked what he hopes for the future of 3D printing, Mr. Weijmarshausen paused for a moment and then said new materials and larger scaling of the industry at large. 3D printing, as he pointed out, is still a very small industry. The faster it grows, the more people will become aware of it, and in his opinion this will be good for not just Shapeways but also for consumers everywhere.
Authored by Brian H. Jaffe, founder of Mission St. Manufacturing and contributor to On 3D Printing.
3D Printing in K-12 Education: Virginia Leads the Way – 3D Printing Conference (Part 7)
Innovating in K-12 Education with 3D Printing
3D printing has been around for three decades, but only recently has the cost of 3D printers been low enough to think about putting this technology in classrooms. Now a partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia, Univeristy of Virginia and the City of Charlottesville has led to the creation of CED (Commonwealth Engineering and Design) Academy at Buford Middle School, a new type of school built specifically around project based learning with the help of new technologies such as 3D printing in K-12 education.
The new program, which opens this August after a $3 million renovation, will have one 3D printer for every 4 students in a classroom, but that is just the beginning. As Glen Bull, Gavin Garner, and Greg Lewin from the University of Virginia put it, “The challenge is to find a curriculum to go with it.” Speaking at this week’s Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York, the trio emphasized that, “You can’t just take a 3D printing lesson plan and drop it into a middle school and say, ‘here you go.’” And this is why the involvement of University of Virginia is so important.
Faculty and students from UVA’s Schools of Engineering and Education are working together to develop and test new curricula for critical STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education that makes use of 3D printing. One of their first successes was a project in which middle school students designed and built a fully functional speaker. Teams were broken into two halves – one to design and test a high frequency tweeter and another to design and test a low frequency woofer – and then at the end of the project the two teams were forced to integrate the two parts into one integrated speaker. In another project, currently still in a pilot stage, undergraduate engineering students are challenged to program a computer controlled pen that was made with a 3D printer.
Overall, the speakers were both optimistic about the future of 3D printing in the classroom, especially the availability of various funding sources, but also cautionary that curricula are difficult to develop and take a lot of time and testing. What is clear is that the Commonwealth of Virginia is taking 3D printing very seriously, and that they are leading the way in 3D printing education.
Authored by Brian H. Jaffe, founder of Mission St. Manufacturing and contributor to On 3D Printing.
