Long has been the promise that 3D printing will provide consumers with individually customized products designed specifically to fit their individual bodies. This, with a few exceptions, has yet to be realized…at least for the large majority of people. But change is on the way, and one company who is going to try to help that change along is Protos Eyewear.
Based out of San Francisco, California, this small startup was formed in 2011 when three friends were sitting around brain-storming the concept of 3D printing and how it could be used for improving product designs. One of the friends was fidgeting with his eyeglasses, and they started asking questions.
Why do people who wear glasses constantly have to adjust and play with them all the time? No two people’s faces are exactly the same, so why are their glasses mass manufactured? What if a person’s glasses were specifically designed and created especially for the unique shape of their face? And with the “one-off” manufacturing capabilities of 3D printing it is possible to do just that. Suddenly the idea of Protos was born.
That’s all well and good you say, but how are people supposed to get down to the factory to have their faces scanned? The Protos answer is that they don’t have to. What makes the Protos idea so compelling is that they have taken great pains to make their company, and more importantly its products, accessible to the general public through their website.
What’s more is that the Protos frames do not look like your typical 3D printed items, hot off someone’s desktop printer. Protos frames have the look and feel of true consumer-grade retail products. By using the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) process with a proprietary polymer material, Protos is able to create products that do not look or feel like they were 3D printed. Protos frames look as if they were manufactured in a more traditional way, thus bridging the consumer-expectation gap between the promise and reality of 3D printing for manufacturing applications.
At the Protos website a customer can choose a style of frames they like, take and submit two facial photographs with their smartphone, and fill out a brief questionnaire…and in a short while their custom designed and manufactured glasses, complete with lenses, are mailed out to them. The video below illustrates the simplicity:
It’s just that easy…or at least it will be soon.
Protos has just launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise the funds needed to perfect and implement their new website concept. If they are able to pull it off — and it looks like they might — they could be posed to be one of the first truly new consumer-based market-manufacturing companies of the new economy. At the time of writing, the campaign has secured 109 pre-orders and raised $18,381 of a $25k target. Keep an eye on them!
