The other day, I was reading this blog post “Protecting WebGL content (and why you probably shouldn’t)” from Brandon Jones. While reading, I got all these flashbacks from the 1990s. Here we go again, I thought!

What is the problem? In short WebGL are Javascript calls as part of a larger javascript program running inside the browser. Due to the nature of the web, javascript — and HTML, CSS and all other web page assets — are open for everybody to see and inspect. When the web was gaining traction, I saw the same reaction to HTML and GIF images. Designers and companies were afraid due to the openness that their site design and image assets were copied all over the place. At the time, it was really hip to obfuscate HTML source code and disable the right-click action inside the browser, so that nobody could copy the web page and its content. Of course, this proved to be fruitless since circumventing these “protections” was trivial.

Now we are in 2012, and nobody is protecting their web page assets anymore. You do see obfuscated javascript code from time to time. But most sites have no protective measures. And you know what? It did not really led to any problems. I am even of the opinion that the open nature of the web accelerated the growth and innovation. People could learn from and get inspired by each other’s accomplishments.

Now we are entering the next evolution of the web with WebGL. I think the reason this question arises again is that 3D on the web brings in a new set of people and companies who were not delivering content on the web before. I am thinking about 3D designers, game designers and their respective companies. They have the same fears as the web designers and developers of 2 decades ago.

In my opinion, the reason that it did not lead to any problems is, that the value of internet services is not in their online digital assets. Those assets are the result of a creation process. The value is in that creation process. Next to that is the interaction. Interaction is mostly a server-side affair — though it partly moved to the client with the advent of AJAX. Server side is maintained and under control of the creators and cannot be copied. If you take games as an example, the value is in the creation of digital assets, the game scenario and playability of the game. If you copy the digital assets, you just end up with just the assets. There is no game.

Just copying the homepage of Google or a timeline of Facebook does not give you the ability to copy their services. You need the whole package.

Of course, there are copies of assets or (parts of) whole sites, but it is really not wild west on the internet. If everybody is benign in nature, why can shops have you freely walk around without supervision. Shoplifting is a problem but shops still exist and make money. The same applies to the internet.

At Shapeways, we use WebGL for our creators. WebGL allows our users to interact directly with the product and see it change in realtime. The generation of the product is done server-side. This is part is valuable to us. It is our intellectual property. At the same time, we use a 3D HTML viewer with generated JPEG sprites to show uploaded 3D models. The reason is that we cannot allow any 3D model information to leak onto the internet. Using WebGL it is theoretically possible to copy a 3D mesh from the GPU and save it. That is not acceptable for a lot of designers in our community.

So yes WebGL is open. You can freely look into the work of others and even copy the work others. But no it is not a problem. HTML javascript and CSS work in a similar way and web designers / internet services thrive regardless.

One of the challenges in 3D printing is making it cheaper and more affordable. There are a few ways to do that. Mostly it boils down to reducing cost, increasing efficiency and increasing output. One of the major drivers of increasing the output is the speed of the printing process. In other words, how fast can the 3D printer produce the products. But how do you do that?

One of the intriguing facts is that all printers do not have — or only extremely limited — closed loop control. In essence, the 3D printers cannot self correct. It makes the whole printing process somewhat of a black art. Just ask any 3D printer machine operator and he will tell you. The best results are produced when the machine is properly cleaned, machine and powder are in a humidity / temperature controlled environment and the builds / trays are packed in a certain way. Then still a stray human hair inside the powder can ruin a whole build.

Then I read this article on Wired today. It is a 3D printer build in the research lab of Pieter Sijpkes. He built an ice printer. The idea and execution is fascinating, but then my eye fell on this: “After every five layers have been deposited, a laser-displacement system measures the geometry of the top layer and adjusts the valve-control data to correct for any errors.”.

I thought “Yes, that sounds like closed loop control!”. I am sure he needed it because the robot arm is probably not terribly precise otherwise, but I love it anyway. I wish that manufacturers would pay more attention to closed loop control in the design of their machines. I am confident it increases the reliability of the 3D printers tremendously and makes it possible to print faster. Both will lower the price of 3D printing — while reducing the frustration of machine operators when they have yet another failed build.

Last week I came across two blog posts in which the authors highlight their frustrations with the current state of 3D printing instead going into how great 3D printing is. The first one is from Robert Mitchell called 3D Printing is awaiting its Ipad moment. He basically argues that 3D printing is a nice technology but is still lacking traction because of technical and content constraints of the current generation of (consumer) 3D printers. The second post is from Anil Dash and is called 3D Printing, Teleporters and wishes. Anil writes about more or less same issues as Robert.

Those two posts flagged my interest because Gartner put 3D printing at the mere top of the hype cycle a few months ago. The next phase is the trough of disillusionment. It seems we are slowly moving into this phase. In my point of view this is a good thing. The previous phase called peak of inflated expectations has done its work. A lot of people are now aware of 3D printing and it is time to start focusing on maturing this technology. We need cheaper, faster and better machines and ditto on materials. This can only happen with economy of scale. 3D printing is still tiny compared to almost any industry. Even the market of CNC machines is several magnitudes bigger than the 3D printing industry of today.

So what did we gain last 2 years? The awareness and knowledge of 3D printing has spread beyond the niche market in which it was in. This is great because it makes 3D printing part of the decision process of product designers and (manufacturing) process engineers. I am hopeful that this will increases the number of applications and the actual usage of the technology. I think the investments in Shapeways ($5.1M — I work there) and MakerBot ($10M) are just two proof points of that.

Regardless of the incapabilities of 3D printing today I am still confident that we can overcome them over time. And if I am honest the technology is already damn useful today. Six months ago, I wrote about the future of 3D printing. In it I laid down four major areas where 3D printing will have a major impact. Those were:

1. Personalized products and personal fabrication
2. Reduction design-to-manufacturing cycle
3. Bring back manufacturing to the Western world
4. Manufacture parts which were not possible before

If I go over this list I see all four of them are happening today. Not on a large world-changing scale yet but I do see it happening of front of my eyes. I am happy to part of it. The same happened with personal computers and the internet. Those are awesome technological achievements and I am happy they happened in my lifetime. 3D printing is in my view another one.

No, I think it is not! Not today. In the 3D Printing scene, a blog post from Robert Mitchell called 3D Printing: A technology awaits its Ipad Moment is making rounds. In this post he argues that 3D printing is not ready yet. He gives two reasons: the first is that 3D printing is too expensive, and second lack of imagination because 3D design software is too complex at this moment. I do not agree. Those are not the reasons why 3D printing is not (yet) mainstream.

Technology can only be truly disruptive when it either creates a new market or (almost) downright replaces an existing market. That is not happening yet, but it can be. As Robert Mitchell writes “As with the tablet PC, 3D printing technology awaits its iPad moment when everything comes together.” That is exactly the point. When you look at history, the invention of the automobile was not disruptive at all. Although looking back, it replaced a complete market (horses) and opened up a new market (personal transportation for the masses). So what happened? Well the T-Ford happened. Early automobiles were cumbersome to operate, expensive and error-prone. With the introduction of the T-Ford, an affordable and reliable automobile came to the market. That made the automobile disruptive. Its invention did not.

The same applies to personal computers. Early personal computers were ugly, expensive and had an extremely limited feature set. Until the birth of the IBM PC, they were niche devices. The concept of a mass-producible and open design made the personal computer big.

Going back to my earlier statement that 3D printing is not disruptive, we are indeed waiting for a few things to come together. I am not a big believer in easy to use personal 3D design software. The act of creation only scales when it is frictionless and effortless. When you look for examples you see that reducing the scope and features are excellent ways to entice people to create. Just take a look at Twitter and Facebook. The act of creation by typing simple messages or uploading pictures is easy. I am sure we will get better and easier to use personal 3D design software, but I am not so sure this will be game changing for 3D printing. There is lots of software which is easy to use but only a limited number of are using it. That is just because it takes time and effort to create something with it. Only when people are genuinely engaged they are prepared to put in time and effort required. This is mostly in the hobby and semi-professional areas. I think for this reason that creating products using 3D software is not going to take off.

The other argument was that 3D printing is still expensive and I agree. But that is more an attribute of where we are today than a reason that 3D printing is not disruptive. Prices will come down over time. When the demand for 3D printing rises economies of scale will make components and materials cheaper. Time solves that problem.

Obviously I am talking in this post about consumer 3D printing. The technology has certainly applications in industrial and professional areas. In those areas it is some cases already disruptive. Hearing aids in the western world are almost exclusively made using 3D printing and a lot of tooth implants as well. The media attention to 3D printing of the last year is helping tremendously to spread the word. A lot of manufacturing engineers I spoke 2–3 years ago were not aware about the abilities of 3D printing or even its existence. That has changed. I expect that much more applications for 3D printing in industrial or B2B products will be developed in the coming years.

3D printing is a powerful technology and a crucial step as a concept in manufacturing. I wrote about that in an earlier post titled What Gets Me Excited About 3D Printing. It has all the attributes to become a serious disruptive technology and indeed it is a matter of time when everything falls together.

David Minich started in 2011 his company Make Eyewear to solve his problem that he could not find any glasses he liked. Now his company delivers designer glasses and personalized glasses — or Freestyle glasses as he calls them — as well. You can order their glasses online. What is interesting is that he uses 3D printing via Shapeways to produce the frames and assembles them before shipping them to customers. There is a great background article on Make Eyewear at Fast Co.Design.

What I like about the story is that it shows two things. First it shows that 3D printing makes startup companies who produce physical goods possible. And second that 3D printing can be used as a manufacturing technology.

Where the internet and open source software have significantly reduced the cost for startups to create online services 3D printing is doing the same for manufacturing. Startups look for product-market fit and need to quickly iterate through product designs based on customer feedback and behavior. The internet and web sites support this type of company development. But the same applies to 3D printing. An entrepreneur can quickly develop and manufacture a design without a lot of upfront investment. He can continuously update the design throughout product-market fit stage of the company.

In existing manufacturing there are two major drawbacks and that is the upfront investment — to create tooling and molds etc. — and lead time — assuming you produce overseas. Both are not helping entrepreneurs to get as fast possible to product-market fit.

Make Eyewear is showing that you can use 3D printing as a manufacturing technology and you can go quickly from design to implementation. I expect that Internet startups will be joined in the near future by (physical) products related startups as the fast rising stars in the business scene.

This week I was at Euromold in Frankfurt. It is a great opportunity to meet everybody in the 3D printing industry and see the machines and their materials. As far as I know there is no comparable trade show in the US except maybe RAPID. But if you compare RAPID to Euromold than RAPID is a tiny industry gathering and Euromold a real trade show. I would recommend Euromold any day over RAPID.

One of my missions was to see if anybody can help us in improve our sorting process. The sorting of products is very much manual work at the moment. And since the volume of unique products rolling out our production facilities is growing rapidly we can improve in this area.
I talked to many suppliers of QA systems and test equipment and it is clear that our challenges are unique. None of the suppliers I talked to had a solution or even thought about the problem.

It is clear that high volume one-off production is bringing new challenges to manufacturing. I do not know any company that does similar stuff than we do. And if they exist I would love to get to know them. There are many things we need to solve to become more scalable as a service. Some of the things on my mind are:

• Part routing and scheduling including prioritization and capacity management
• Smart and efficient tray / build packing
• 3D printer remote control
• High speed part identification and sorting
• Automated QA / production validation

Scaling production for Shapeways is much more than adding production capacity. Actually making sure parts are made just-in-time and shipped on time to the right customer with perfect quality is quite a challenge. It is interesting to find that the available solutions in the market are very limited to non-existing to help us in those areas.

Well it is not 3D printing per se. Don’t get me wrong 3D printing is an awesome technology and it is a great advancement in technology. I see exciting new 3D printed products every day. But what really gets me excited is the concept of 3D printing or actually digital manufacturing. 3D printing builds products from the ground up by adding and arranging material. This concept changes the paradigm on how things get manufactured and it enables to produce local and in micro volumes.

Most manufacturing is analog — even when driven or controlled by computers the process is still analog. It transforms materials into parts or parts of parts. 3D printing instead builds the product from a base material. To me there is a fundamental difference between the two methods of manufacturing. I see this approach to manufacturing popping up everywhere.

Some examples:

• Molecular Assemblers
• Rapid Assembler
• Bacterial Manufacturing
• Stochastic Modular Assembly

The approach of building things from the ground up appeals to me more than the traditional manufacturing methods. Intuitively it feels more logical.

You can compare 3D printing today with vacuüm tubes from the past. It took 60 years to get the point where we are today where your average phone has more computing power than supercomputers of only 2 decades ago. We went from vacuüm tube to transistors to miniaturization of transistors on chips. But during that revolution it changed fundamentally how we looked at information processing and mathematical problems. The same will happen with 3D printing. The 3D printers of today will be forgotten in a few decades but the impact on manufacturing and how we design, create and make products will fundamentally change.

This is the reason it so important that 3D printers are going into schools. because our students of today need to start thinking about this new way of manufacturing to prepare them for this future.

Analog methods are variations and improvements to century old knowledge on how to build stuff. We made it 1000x more efficient, reliable and cheaper in centuries of improving and polishing these old manufacturing processes.

3D printing is just one of the “new” manufacturing approach, but I am bullish that we will see much more of these technologies become mainstream and maybe replace all current manufacturing methods all together.

One of my dreams that all historic artifacts become available on the internet for all the see. Museums all over the world are filled with these amazing and beautiful artifacts ranging from sculptures of Michelangelo to Maya pottery. And it does not stop at museums. There are churches and other religious temples all over the world with interesting artifacts on display. And you can find sculptures and fantastic buildings all over the world. Italy comes to mind with cities like Rome, Pompeii and Venice. Same could be said of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Cairo’s pyramids. The list is endless.

Just imagine when all these artifacts are 3D scanned and their digital replicas become available to all. The scanned artifacts can be used to create virtual museums. Field experts and enthusiasts can create virtual collections. Academics can use them for research without having access to the physical object. Students can study artifacts in detail without having to travel or stare at photographs. That can significantly change the field of archaeology. 
Digitalization of our world’s heritage will help in preservation, conservation and restoration of these ancient artifacts before they are lost or broken beyond repair.

But the digitalization of world’s heritage will also enable for average people to bring the world’s heritage into their homes. It would be as easy as ordering a 3D printed copy. It helps spread history beyond museums and historic places. I am sure experts will argue that replicas are not the same and may even be appalled by the idea that a scaled version of famous artifacts like Michelangelo’s sculptures are produced. But honestly stuffing them into overcrowded museums 1000 miles away is not making them very accessible either.

Besides the ethical part of reproducing artifacts there are other stumbling blocks as well. For instance the right to reproduce these artifacts comes to mind. Many governments and most museums do not allow any form of replication of their collections. For museums photographs and replicas are an important revenue source.
To be honest I think that no government or museum can own the exclusive right to replicate an artifact when it is important part of history. They can limit access for conservation purposes but they have no right to bar access to the public for any other reason. The world’s heritage is owned by the world’s population.

There are technical challenges as well. 3D scanning is not good enough yet to capture complex geometric shapes very well. It works great for sculptures but more complex shapes are next to impossible to 3D scan properly and accurately. CT-scans are a better option. It can capture complex geometries though it does not capture the color and texture of an item. It is a geometry only option. After scanning the resulting digital output needs significant manual work to turn it into a useful geometry for further processing and making it available online. To capture the texture of an artifact 3D photography can help. If you could somehow combine CT-scans and 3D photographs we may have a winner.
Some work in this area is undertaken by Stanford University in the form the Large Statue Scanner. They used the scanner to make an accurate 3D scan of Michelangelo’s David sculpture in Florence, Italy. Interesting fact is that while scanning they found out that sculpture was actually a few inches larger than recorded.

The world’s heritage of art, artifacts and architecture are owned by the world and we are now (almost) technically able of making it available for the world to see and own. Like the book scanning project of Google we should embark on an artifact scanning project as well. Just imagine when viewing the Wikipedia page on Michelangelo’s David and from there you can view the sculpture in all its glory and details. And when you like you can get a small replica for yourself as well. I think we owe it to ourselves that we can do that.

Traditionally 3D printing equipment is owned and operated by prototyping service bureaus. Their specialization is in the manufacturing of prototypes. But the last couple of years prices for 3D printing have dropped significantly. This price drop had two causes. The first is the economy down turn. R&D budgets are slashed and idle machines still cost money. Second is the rise of 3D printing only outlets who focus only on 3D printing.

Service bureau deliver more services than 3D printing alone. For them 3D printing is one of the tools to make beautiful prototypes for their customers. They have in-house machines like CNC routers, lathes and molding equipment like injectors. They mold, paint and plate parts upon customer request. In the end service bureaus deliver unique one-off production completely customized to the customer’s wishes.

3D printing as a manufacturing process is making inroads and the developments over the coming years will make it a common production process. Prices will keep on dropping and smaller 3D printing outlets will need to consolidate to keep prices low and stay competitive.

A lot of service bureaus are struggling with their 3D printing equipment. They are expensive to own and run. They see part of their existing customer base move to specialized 3D printing outlets while their other customers demand lower prices since 3D printing has become so cheap. With their own setup it is hard to compete with 24/7 3D printing shops. Service bureaus reacted by lowering their prices as well and run their 3D printing business in some cases at a loss. This is not a long-term sustainable situation.
Other service bureaus seize the opportunity to invest more in 3D printing equipment and start producing parts in higher numbers with lower margins. 3D printing like any manufacturing process is very capital-intensive and they need to keep up with new players in the market. If they can grow quick enough and can reach a significant part of the 3D printing market in their region they have a great opportunity to grow and become a sustainable business. If they do not they are eaten in the consolidation wave coming to this industry in the coming years.

Service bureaus are at cross roads and they have to decide which strategy they want to follow. Either they keep on focusing on producing prototypes for their customers or they refocus their efforts and become one of the 3D printing factories in the world.

I am waiting for the first service bureau to outsource all their 3D printing and phase out all their 3D printing equipment. Their added value to their customers does not change. Maybe they can even better service their customers if they have a wider range of 3D printing options available to produce their prototypes. Their print-only customer base is going away anyway. Currently they still win on support and lead time but those advantages will soon go away. That leaves only the relationship but in the end company budgets will win.

The following short animation called FULL PRINTED was made for the exhibition “Laboratory of Manufacturing” at the Museum Design Hub in Barcelona last year. It is great short about how 3D printing, manufacturing, crowdsourcing of design, co-creation and iterative design can work.

There is only one thing which bugs me every time I see this video and that is the USB key to store the design and bring it to the FabLab to print it. Storing data on a USB stick? Is anybody still using that?