Hi, this is Frank Romano. Welcome back. Well several things on the agenda, but most sort of in the same realm. There’s an article that appeared recently that says, “Researchers aim to print human skin…
Well, this is being done in other places, but this article just came to this publications attention. Again, Cornell University, University of Southern California… I’m sorry, University of South Carolina. I’ll get that right. Have discovered that you can jet cells onto a scrim and therefore you can create skin. By the way, they’re doing it with bone, they’re doing it with tissue, they’re doing it with a number of human-related materials. And of course, if you suffer burn injuries, this could be a way of restoring some of your skin. So, we can now print human skin.
Now, I think there’s a marvelous opportunity here because you can also have the tattoo printed at the same time…
But the best one of all is this on here that says, “Print Yourself in 3D.” Now, this article appeared in a number of publications and some people sent it to me. Whenever something’s weird out there, people send it to me, it’s very interesting the dynamic of that. It’s a system based on, believe it or not, a program that Microsoft developed of some sort, but with inkjet devices that deposit various layers of plasticized material. And you can fabricate yourself. In other words, you pose in front of an Xbox Connect and it converts your captured image into a 3D printable file. And then you send it out to this device.
Now, this device is not cheap. It’s from a company called Stratesis, it sells for $12,000…
And it then makes up a model of you with deposited plastic. When it dries and hardens, it becomes your likeness, it becomes your mini me. You’re mini you, my mini me…
Mini them. In any case, this could open up a whole new realm, by the way of euphemisms. Go print yourself…
It could be interesting. Now, $12,000, now… you can imagine then within a few years it’s not going to be $12,000. It’s going to be something much less than that because over time, things come down in price. So it’s entirely possible within the next decade, you can have machines for making toys that look just like your children. A whole batch of mini kids of various kinds…
And of course the software will allow you to modify those images, put different clothing on them, put different colors on them…
Open up a whole new world. So anything that can be jetted, anything that can be made into some kind of liquefied material and forced through an orifice….
Can be deposited, shaped and used to create just about anything you can imagine. So Inkjet is wonderful for printing, but now you have the ability to print 3 dimensional objects like yourself.
And that’s my opinion…
And I think this is what it’s all about. We’re going to promote print… you just can’t say print is better…
Discussion
By Grace Gladney on Apr 13, 2011
I'm still laughing...
By Michael Riebesehl on Apr 15, 2011
Hey Frank you missed an angle with your story. How about a 3/D printer that jets cells this way you can have a mini clone of me/you/them.
I dread the thought!
Mike