I Print the Body Electric!
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a few links about 3D printing. Apparently the process has existed for a few years, but I hadn’t heard about it until recently.
Well, in the past few weeks I’ve come across two stories about 3D printing that really blew my mind.
Seriously, I'm talking Twilight Zone weirdness here. Submitted for your approval, two articles about printing body parts:
Scientists at University College London devise method for "printing" line-based structures of embryonic stem cells.
Researchers in Switzerland "print" thumb bone.
And, in non-Frankenstein-related 3D printing news, a recent posting on the Wired blog "Geek Dad" alerted me to a company called Shapeways that offers online creation and ordering of personalized products that (I assume) are produced with a 3D printer.
What clever name can we give this business model? Web3DPrint? 3D VDP? Oooh, I know, 3DVDPW2P!.
Ahem...anyways...the most interesting Shapeways’ product, in my opinion, is the Lightsculpture, a picture-frame sized relief model generated from users’ photos. I’m not sure how it works, but they're designed to be lit from behind, and they look really cool.
A Shapeways Lightsculpture lit by candle.
The same Ligthsculpture in front of a window.
Users simply upload their picture, add text (optional), and order.
The video on the Shapeways website gives a better demonstration of how these look. You can check it out here.
Finally, if you’re a designer and you want to create 3D images the old fashioned way (on your computer dagnabit!) you can check out this post on Six Revisions that contains links to “40 Useful Adobe Illustrator 3D Tutorials and Techniques.”
In Wi-Fi Web 2.0 World, Pictures Upload You!
Last week, I commented on the ease of file transmission in Microsoft’s vision of the future videos. If you had a chance to see any of the videos, you might recall that a few shots showed people transferring files, almost as if by magic, by simply waving one portable device in front of another.
Well, this week I came across something fairly close to Microsoft's magic file transmission: the Eye-Fi memory card for digital cameras. It’s a wi-fi enabled memory card that allows users to wirelessly transmit photos to their computers and favorite social sites.
One model of the card, the Eye-Fi Explore, even allows users who are away from home to upload photos from Wayport hotspots (for a list of Wayport hotspots, check here.)
The existence of these wi-fi memory cards set my mind a-scheming, and, as I’m prone to do, I began connecting the dots of social media, web2print, and VDP.
I came up with just one scenario, but I’m sure a ton of other possibilities exist for printers to take advantage of this technology.
First, let’s say a bride and groom create a profile on a social networking site for their upcoming wedding, and that all invitees can link their personal profiles to this event (wedding) profile. Then, imagine that the social site contains an app that generates basic photo book layouts from uploaded photos.
Invitees to the wedding who have digital cameras equipped with a wi-fi memory card could have their photos instantly uploaded—I mean immediately, mid-Chicken Dance or garter toss—to the photo book layout on their individual social site profiles. Then, a web2print engine built into the social site could transmit all the invitee-generated photo books to a nearby tech savvy print service provider, whose lights out, automated digital workflow would allow for delivery of the personalized photo books to the wedding hotel the next morning, before anyone has even gotten rid of their hangover!
Ok, maybe the overnight delivery is a bit of a stretch, but I think the rest is very believable. Your thoughts?
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