Tag Archives: Wired
Top 3D Printing Headlines Last Week: Black Friday, Portraits, M&A
A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from November 21 to November 25.
Wednesday, November 21
Friday, November 23
Saturday, November 24
Sunday, November 25
Chris Anderson: 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than the Web
Chris Anderson, visionary author and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, sees a future where 3D printing drives the next industrial revolution. “It will be bigger than the Web,” Anderson predicts.
Speaking at a Culturazzi event where he was also signing copies of his new book, Anderson drew analogies from the Spinning Jenny and today’s 3D printers. He also noted how the entire desktop publication industry eventually boiled down to one icon on a computer called “Print.” The next revolution will simplify to one icon: “Make.”
Anderson is so convinced of this future that he left his post as editor-in-chief of Wired to become a pioneer of 3D printing. We are excited to see what he comes up with!
Of course, 3D printers were on hand – along with wine – to inspire the Culturazzi guests. In the photo above, a Cubify printer shows off how simple 3D printing has become.
Full story via ZDNet.
Photos by Tom Foremski.
Making 3D Printing Accessible: Interview with Tinkercad Founder
Kai Backman, co-founder and CEO of Helsinki-based Tinkercad, was interviewed by Wired magazine last week. Tinkercad allows mainstream consumers to design 3D models in their web browser for free, competing with traditional professional software costing thousands of dollars. Below are some excerpts from the interview.
What inspired you to create Tinkercad?
Tinkercad was born from a very personal frustration. In 2009, I started researching the new emerging 3-D printing technology and eventually bought my first printer by the end of the year. The device was assembled with great fanfare and my children eagerly looked forward to printed toys while my wife expected jewelry or at least some useful household items. Much to their disappointment it turned out that actually designing anything for printing was extremely hard with the software available. I would spend the evening learning one CAD system after another, only to get very little traction and forgetting most of what I learned before the next session.
In mid-2010 it had become clear the problem was more and more acute for a lot of people, so I quit my job at Google, Mikko my co-founder quit his job, and we started the company. We are still on the same road, our vision is to make 3-D design in general, and the design of physical items in particular, accessible to hundreds of millions of people.
On the Tinkercad Comunity
We let users choose how they want to publish their things and a lot of them use a Creative Commons license. This means the tinkercad.com site has a rapidly growing repository of interesting 3-D designs and an equally rapidly growing base of users.
Asked what Kai’s favorite 3D design is in the community, he pointed us to an historic train station on the Harlem line called Brewster Station.
Below is a video walkthrough of Tinkercad that showcases how it is feature rich despite the fact that it runs in a browser.
Read the full interview at Wired.
Tinker Towne photo by kafkan used under Creative Commons license.
What to 3D Print: Wired Showcases the Best of Thingiverse
Wired and Thingiverse teamed up to showcase some of the most impressive 3D printing designs that can be printed on your MakerBot.
Above is a genuine Mario Kart Koopa shell racer.
His goal was to build a full-size RC vehicle based on Mario Kart Koopa shells. The Makerbot’s constraints would have stymied a lesser designer, but by breaking the design into small parts, Skimbal created a large, multi-color object, where the resolution is barely noticeable. The project takes over 40 hours to complete, but it’s like being able to print the Mona Lisa in your garage.
Next we have a Lincoln Log cabin. We have covered the disruptive impact that 3D printing will have on the toy industry. Why buy expensive toys when you can 3D print cheap generics?
And finally, we have a novel design called Big Love Heart Gears. This is something that would not be possible with traditional manufacturing processes because the design is printed as one interconnected object.
Via Wired.
