How 3D printers could change our lives (and create new opportunities for Telcos)?
3D printers present a whole new range of opportunities for users and telecommunications companies. They could also completely shape the landscape of factories and shops as we know them today.
They look like basic printers (a bit bigger) and they can produce a 3D object from a digital model of the object by laying down layers after layers of a special material until complete. You can use different materials, ranging from polymers, titanium, or even gold powder.
What could you print? I can think of things such as industrial components (pipes, parts for cars), clothes (e.g. shoes), furniture, jewelry, and why not, chip designs for electronics, and food!! (see this article for a printer that produces sugar objects)
For now they are mostly used to build models for architects and fashion designers, and they are a bit slow, but you can imagine how the technology could improve over the years to come.
I first saw one working last year at the Renacer conference and since then I have been thinking about their possible implications.
How many times you have waited for a product that is out of stock? What if you could just download a detailed digital design of the product and have it printed at home?
At that point, a lot of factories and shops could well disappear! Everything would be intellectual property and data flowing around. We would just spend time thinking and designing, not so much doing hand labor. Finally, human kind would be freed to do what they can do best, thinking. That would be a revolution!
And for Telcos and networking companies that would be a great opportunity too. Imagine how many terabytes of data would need to be shipped from one corner of the world to another to describe with the finest level of detail a given product so that the printer could build it. Huge volumes of data would be flowing from designers directly to user’s homes, and that would need to happen in a timely manner. We would be talking about shipping bits, not physical goods anymore, and Telcos would then become the FedEx of the Internet! Who said that networking was a dead field? J
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For more info you can also see this Economist article.
mia:
very cool. FedEx of the Internet idea would also work with 3D TV!
16 January 2008, 10:49 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Nikos:
… and P2P cannot help here because products tend to become customized for the individual instead of “one size fits all”
23 January 2008, 6:22 amJohan Paz:
3D printers terrifies me. It is an incredible bad idea. The ecological performance of that kind of things (try to imagine just one of that things just per building, not per home) would be awful, especially in the short term. And what about the usability? Fit an IKEA chair together is more than enough for me. Download the parts, create them one by one in the 3D printer, and put together by myself sound like a nightmare.
The ‘photocopy’ machine is not in the homes, they are in the offices and in specialized shops. 3D printers seems to me a fast way to build prototypes, fit together and try, not for general public. So, thinking about a FedEx in Internet sounds crazy for me.
Perhaps in very far future, if we have resolve the energy, ecology and material crisis, and when the 3D printer are really small and really efficient… not now at all. Oh, probably we can do it, but they are a lot of waste of energy and material for almost nothing ‘real’.
Sorry my awful english.
24 January 2008, 9:04 amadmin:
A few relevant and very interesting links from Xavier Amatriain:
One on his blog
http://technocalifornia.blogspot.com/2007/04/teleportation.html
NY Times article:
http://tinyurl.com/2bmlde
An amazing project at Carnegie Mellon’s Claytronics:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eclaytronics/papers/2006-10-3DFax-IROS2006.pdf
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/
Another project at Stanford:
24 January 2008, 9:55 amhttp://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/faxing/
anonymous:
I do not understand the “Telcos would then become the FedEx of the Internet”, why would I need a Telco to use a 3D printer? As far as I see it, I only need a pipe with flat rate (not necessarily big if I am patient…) to connect the 3D printer to wherever in Internet is the design (probably Amazon). Indeed, for that I can get my pipe from a Cableco or just join a free hotspot offered by FON, Meraki or anyone and download the design in my laptop and then print it at home…
Thinking this more carefully, this could be a horrible business for Telcos: as most of them offer flat rates to their customers, they will see their costs soar (due to “Huge volumes of data would be flowing from designers directly to user’s homes”) while seeing not a single additional cent from their customers. And before you say it, please let’s not go into the “Telcos can guarantee QoS for timely delivery”… Fibre is going to get to the homes before 3D printers and with 100 Mbps access, nobody needs QoS (unless the Telco does traffic shaping, but this is not an option due to net neutrality…)
2 February 2008, 8:04 pmadmin:
I think that things will change little as long as the current consumer flat rate billing system remains.
However, transit relationships within ISPs are non-flat and things could change in the future if massive point to point transfers of data become even more frequent.
As access speeds get faster (e.g. with fiber), single users could well use large amount of network resources.
In that case, one could imagine that differentiated billing options could be arise, billing high-volume/low priority traffic at a low rate, and vice-versa.
Even today, enterprise traffic (as opposed to residential traffic) is often based on volume billing, thus, shipping data across branch offices can be quite costly.
From my own experience, it can be cheaper to mail over the post a hard drive with your large data across the ocean than FTPing the same amount of data over an intercontinental enterprise VPN link. If that is the case, then having the option to trade cost for delay may be appealing and new networking protocols will need to be developed for that — in the same way that FedEX created new ways to ship data from point (a) to point (b) using airports during non-peak hours.
This is an interesting presentation on the topic:
3 February 2008, 1:22 pmhttp://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/ARCADIA/talks/Gummadi.pdf
Nikos:
Let’s try to put things in perspective. We’re talking about mass usage of 3D printing … that will take some years from now, at least. Who know’s what charging schemes will be in place then. Don’t think we should confine ourselves inside the box of flat rate that is currently the norm.
5 February 2008, 12:53 pmPau:
Personal Fabrication is a very powerful paradigm that might take off in the near future (http://pausoler.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/personal-fabrication/). We have seen the same phenomena taking place in the past in other areas, and it makes sense for at least some applications. Actually, there are some companies that start to offer this service, e.g.: www.ponoko.com. And there are some more visionary applications in the way, such as the ‘gadget’ printer: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3238
24 April 2008, 4:51 amJames:
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
19 September 2008, 1:04 amAve:
Sounds Star Trek-ish to me. “Yo bro, gimme some pancakes!” A 3-D pancake-producing printer. Cool
Me está encantando tu blog. Lo seguiré atentamente.
21 September 2008, 6:00 am