There is at last progress on bringing 3D to the web. For years, different companies have tried to solve this problem, but the solutions — often with proprietary browser plugins — were cumbersome and limited. With the creation of WebGL, there is finally a way forward.

There are a host of solutions to bring 3D to the web. There are straightforward solutions like animated GIFs of pre-rendered 3D images or a little more advanced like javascript animated JPG or PNG images with limited interaction with the 3D model. These solutions are extremely well supported with most browsers — even mobile ones. A notable example is the 3DNP (3D No Plugin).

Adobe Flash supports 3D since last year and the same applies for Microsoft Silverlight. Flash has a sizeable installed base and is truly platform-independent except for the Apple IOS platforms. The plugin suffers from performance issues on a certain platform like Linux. Silverlight is very much geared towards Windows and Mac OS X. The installed base is quite low, and Microsoft seems to have lost interest in moving Silverlight forward. They are currently repositioning it for Windows 8 mobile. The 3D engine is still immature and needs improvements. I expect that Microsoft will improve it for the next Windows Mobile version to enable gaming.
Performance wise both plugins are limited by their underlying technologies. Adobe cannot go beyond 50,000 polygons to achieve smooth animation and Silverlight is even more limited than Flash.

Another option is Java. Java has a mature openGL implementation called Jogl. It provides hardware accelerated 3D engine which is extremely powerful. The major issue for real 3D performance is the limited memory available to an applet. An applet can only use 64MB, and this effectively limits the polygon count to around 250,000. Another problem is that OpenGL support is buggy. On Windows OpenGL support is provided by the video card vendors, and the level of support varies per vendor. On other platforms — like Linux — it is the same story.

This year WebGL came to life with support from Google, Apple and Mozilla. It is build on top of the HTML5 canvas-element. It is managed through Khronos standardization group who are also responsible for managing the Collada 3D file format standard. Microsoft is sitting on the side lines without any support for WebGL in Internet Explorer.
In short, WebGL exposes OpenGL calls to the javascript engine and uses the HTML renderer to show the result. This enables far better integration with web applications, and this is already shown by online 3D editors like 3DTin and Tinkercad.
WebGL suffers from the same problem as Java applets using Jogl and that are the buggy OpenGL implementations.
For compatibility reasons, the number of vertices are limited to 65k (16-bits) per mesh which is quite low. Fortunately multiple meshes are supported and scenes or models with up to 500k triangles stay interactive in the browser.

To me WebGL is a significant move forward in making 3D possible on the internet via a browser using an open standard. It has all the conditions to be a success. The biggest challenge is to keep WebGL secure. It exposes direct hardware calls to javascript, and it depends on the filtering techniques of the browser javascript engine to make it secure.
In the end, I am confident that WebGL will succeed. We finally have a 3D solution for the web. Now it is time to make use of it.

I would like to close with this extremely impressive demo from Google about the capabilities of WebGL:

One of the problems in 3D design is that 3D models do not — or to a limited extend — capture any design intent. The technical requirements for manufacturing a part or product are hard to extract from a design let alone the functional requirements.

This is already a very basic problem in the 3D printing industry with regard to material specifications. There are multiple material printers on the market but they are nearly impossible to use because 3D software does not capture how things are made.

But the requirements go beyond materials alone. Parts need to have particular properties to function as intended. The production process is in itself less important and should be determined by the available resources. These properties need to be captured in the design.

There is also something like design intent which is also not captured. If a designer gets a design from another designer the design intent is not captured in the 3D model. This makes it hard for another designer to make adaptations to that design. He needs to reverse-engineer the design intent to be able to do that. Imagine an adaption of design based on a particular functional requirement. For instance you have an USB stick and you want to change the design to micro-USB. Fundamentally the impact of that decision is low but without knowledge on the actual design it hard to make that adaption.

The current file formats are very poor at capturing design decisions. There is a need for a Design Meta Language on top of the existing file formats which allows designers to store intent, function and properties of parts and components.

So why is that important you ask yourself? Well for one to make it possible to let non-designers customize designs without the need to have a designer available. There are situations where that is not feasible like a war zone or in space or when it just too expensive like in most consumer applications. Consumers can improve designs and share them with others. They can improve or adapt it further and so on. It is called iterative design.

Today an article in Space.com appeared about tests a company Made In Space did with two 3D printers during a few zero-gravity flights. It is unclear from the article if the tests were successful or not. Regardless there are a couple of reasons why 3D printing makes so much sense.

The first requirement is for manned space flight into our solar system is that we can actual do manufacturing in space. At the moment all stuff is hauled from Earth and brought to space. Sometimes some assembly is required but we send mostly finished products in space. This limits us to wander very far from earth. The production, testing and shooting things into space is extremely costly and time-consuming.

The second requirement is that we need to be able to fix what is broken — even far from home. When we send people to Mars you cannot just order and replace a broken part. Because of this reason spaceships and space equipment are build according to the highest quality standards possible to avoid that they break. But of course things break nonetheless. Just imagine a design flaw which causes a part to break. If we would lower quality standards and can accept things will break in space the cost of design and manufacturing for space equipment can go down significantly.

The third requirement is when we venture further in space we cannot prepare 100% for what we will find or encounter. We need to be able to adapt existing equipment or make new ones.

The fourth requirement is that we simply cannot take everything with us.

Here comes 3D printing to the rescue. It offers a few solutions to these problems. 3D printers allow to manufacture on the spot using basic materials. On a space mission only these basic materials should be on board. I can imagine that we would mine local resources like moon dust to build parts.
When parts fail during a mission because of design flaws astronauts can modify the design — or even receive it from earth — and build an improved part on the spot. New parts can be created as well and produced for opportunities or problems we could not envision when the mission started.

The current state of 3D printing is still not up to the level it is good enough to actually solve the aforementioned problems but I am confident that we can get there. I can only imagine what will happen when NASA would put her weight behind this technology and actually starts to move this industry forward like she did in other industries as well.

In general 3D printing is called 3D printing. But there are many other names or acronyms used for this technology.

So far I have seen:

• Additive Manufacturing (AM) — as opposite to subtractive manufacturing (CNC and others)
• Additive Fabrication (AF)
• Rapid Prototyping (RP) — old term when the technology was mostly used to make.. well.. prototypes
• Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF)
• Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM)

I am not sure who thought of the term 3D printing. Personally I favor 3D printing simply because most people immediately have some sense on what it means.

That is an excellent question. Multiple people invented 3D printing technology around the same time. Some articles on the internet state that Chuck Hull was the inventor of 3D printing. I did some research on the patents in this area and here are my findings.

Indeed the first commercial machine was offered by 3D Systems — company founded by Chuck Hull — in 1986. Based on internet research he seems to have invented the machine in 1984 but waited to file a patent for stereolithography (SLA) until 1989.

Carl Deckard filed for a patent on Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) in 1986. The same year Chuck Hull commercialized SLA technology.

But Ross Housholder already filed a patent in 1979 for “A molding process for forming a three-dimensional article in layers”. The patent was never commercialized, but it was referenced in the patent of SLA by Chuck Hull.

So to me Ross Housholder is the inventor of 3D printing.

In my post on blank canvas syndrome I wrote about that co-creation is a solution. In this post I would like to write about how co-creation — or co-design — can help and which approaches work best. It is based on some excellent research done by Loughborough University.

There are two approaches to let consumers do co-creation:

1. Consumers design their own and have a designer help them
2. Consumers choose a template and a designer modifies this template to their liking

When taking approach 1 consumers only deliver 1 design to the designer. They do not use multiple iterations or explore the design using multiple designs. Their final design is delivered to the designer. The designer need to abstract all design intent from this one drawing.
Interesting enough they regard the first drawing delivered by the designer as a draft and feel the need for iterating on the design to come to a final design which they like. They clearly recognize at that moment that multiple iterations are necessary.
Consumers expect that when the designer starts working with them that the designer “fills in the blanks” in their design — both from a functionality as an aesthetics perspective.

Most people prefer approach 2 from a process perspective by far while at the same time they are more satisfied with the results of approach 1. Consumers definitely suffer from the blank canvas syndrome and experience discomfort when they have to design their own ideas. At the same time the result of this approach leads to much higher satisfaction with the end result.
This means that any consumer taking approach 1 is very motivated to get the end result but the actual market demand is much lower. Research shows that only 10% of all consumers like this approach. The other 90% is much more comfortable with the template approach.
Approach 2 gives a less unique feeling over the end result. Consumers think that others will come to the same design changes they asked for.

For more information please read these two excellent articles:

1. From Configuration to Design: Capturing the Intent of User Designers (Part 1)
2. From Configuration to Design: Capturing the Intent of User-Designers (Part 2)

Through ASTM a new universal 3D printing file format to replace the defacto standard STL. The effort was headed up by Hod Lipson. The new file format offers much more options and control to specify attributes for 3D printing of 3D models. It is an XML-based file format and is AMF (Additive Manufacturing File Format).

“This new format will mark the beginning of a new era of 3D printing capability,” Lipson said. “It’s a bit like when the world of printers took off once postscript was invented, because all printers became mutually compatible.”

For more information see the ASTM AMF page or the corresponding wikipedia article.

It remains to be seen how the 3D printer manufacturers and software developers pick this up Meanwhile I hope this XKCD cartoon is far from the truth…

Recently I came across again this video and I thought it is a good idea to share it on my blog. In this video Scott Summit gives his vision on the future of 3D printing from a design perspective. Please be aware it is quite lengthy but worth watching.