The Industries 3D Printing Will Revolutionise

There has been a lot of hype about 3D printing of late. I dropped into the Inside 3D Printing Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago to discover whether hyperbole matches reality. Is the industry about to explode? Will we see the death of traditional manufacturing? Is it only a matter of time before we see a 3D printer, as we did with television in the 50's and PCs in the 80’s, ‘in every home’?

If you believe the evangelistic speakers who were there, we are about to see a 3D printer outbreak similar to the PC revolution back in the late seventies and early eighties. They also inevitably made comparison to the now infamous ‘Palo Alto Home Brew Club’ where Steve Wozniak first demonstrated his homemade Apple I which helped to start the movement back in 1976.

Witnessing the weird collection of hobbyists huddled around a host of even weirder looking contraptions with expressions of unbridled awe, I could see the relevance in this comparison. These self-confessed geeks and early adopters seemed as fascinated by how to pull the equipment apart and put it back together again than actually caring about what the equipment did. And, in a similar vein to the sometimes overwhelming frustrations and limitations of early personal computers - the outputs were also underwhelming. There is, for the layperson, only so much excitement you can generate for a collection of moving cogs, bangles or plastic action figures in mono-colour. And yes, the clunky software and myriad tales of breakdowns and failures were in full flight.

In fact, during the lecture that boasted a live demonstration of this ‘world-changing technology’, (and yes, I do use that phrase with a certain degree of irony given it's been around for twenty years), the miracle machine (not the one in the photo) malfunctioned and spat out a pile of muck - rather than a 3D plastic logo of the event, which was meant to magically appear. The second time around, I admit, it worked - though it still only produced a rather average serrated piece of plastic, which a decent molder could have produced in half the time and at half the cost.

So is 3D printing Hype, Hobby - or a Hero waiting to happen?

Putting my somewhat negative initial perceptions aside, my honest opinion is that these early adopters could well be onto something. With 3D printer costs coming down, speeds going up, and reliability improving, it's clear that once these gadgets are in the hands of the young and innovative - on a mass scale - then there will be unimaginable breakthroughs. But for me, what was more exciting than the consumer applications was the potential for revolution on an industrial scale.

Three standout examples of how 3D printing could revolutionise existing industry were:

1. Housing – Imagine a world where the walls of a house are printed layer by layer in the exact configuration of your custom design, which has been programmed on a laptop – and it happens within hours. This was the dream of Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of California and thanks to his industrial sized cement 3D printing gantry it is slowly coming to fruition with proof of concept walls already making headlines around the world.

2. Medicine – For some time, 3D printers have been pioneering custom-made manufacturing within medical fields as diverse as dentistry and orthopaedics - and producing exo-skeletons for growing kids that would previously have been prohibitively expensive.

However, it is the breakthroughs occurring in the field of Bioprinting that look set to change medicine forever. Bioprinting is the use of bio matter and cells to print body parts to an exacting scale such as livers and other organs. Reprinting exact replicas of your organs as you need them might seem like fantasy now – but I recommend you watch this space.

3. Space – One of the main hindrances to space exploration and habitation is the cost and size limitation of blasting Earth made cargo into space. What if the game changer for space was the ability to print equipment, spacecraft and accommodation from Lunar dust or Martian minerals? This is the mission of Made in Space and with the first trial being shipped to the International Space Station next year, reality could be years rather than decades away.

For me, 3D printers are much more than an emerging hardware – rather, they are a great example of the incredible power of software. Yes, software (albeit in the early stages). If you really think about it, this is why early versions of Windows arguably helped the PC revolution as much as any hardware improvement and why Apple’s iPhone helped catapult the smartphone industry to meteoric success. Sure the iPhone handset was elegant and simple, (read few buttons), however it was the software that drove the ‘app’ innovations. These applications are constantly updated, tested and scaled by third parties - whereas the hardware has changed very little in five years.

Similarly, the potential innovation of 3D printers is not merely in the hardware – it is the fact that the manufacturing outputs aren’t controlled by complicated robotics that have to be reassembled for simple changes. Rather, the power is in the software – which will help users realise their customised imaginings in real time.

Whilst we might not end up with a 3D printer in every living room or study in the near future, I feel quite sure there will be a massive take-up of customisable design software on every digital device before the decade is out.

Photo: Courtesy of Cubify