About a month back, Carl Bass did an interview with PopSci in which the CEO of Autodesk reflected on the current state of 3D printing and its possible future. He said that, while the technology has made leaps and bounds since its infancy over twenty years ago, it still has some hurdles to cross before we see some of the predictions he’s made. Namely, home 3D printing is still limited by the types of materials it can handle and that any development in the technology will have to deal with “the problem of 3s” – that challenges are multiplied to the third power as the printing deals with three dimensions.
But Bass predicts that, as we overcome these obstacles, we’ll see some really amazing developments, including large-scale printing and printing with unique materials, like human tissue. He says that 3D printing really gives humans “software control over how things are fabricated or how things are manufactured.”, implying a more one to one ration when it comes to production, as a user can directly manufacture individual, customized items, on an as-needed basis. The CEO indicates that this is an inversion of the model formed by the industrial revolution, saying, “in order to have really high quality at a low price, you had to make a lot of stuff. You had to make thousands or millions of the same object. All of a sudden, with these kind of 3D printers or other kinds of digital fabrication techniques, we can make really precise, really high quality things and we can do it in a small number and at a reasonable price.”
Since Bass’s interview, we’ve already seen significant progress towards the future he outlined with researchers at Organovo printing a functioning micro-liver and Dutch architects beginning work on the first 3D-printed house. Scientists at Cornell have successfully transplanted printed intervertebral discs into lab rats. American Graphite Technologies Inc. and the Khariv Institute of Physics and Technology Are looking into printing with atom-thick graphene filament. Oxford University researchers manufactured a new material resembling human tissue. We’ve also seen advances in the gamut of multicolor printing with Mcor’s paper-based printing procedure. And, based off of the voxel model illustrated by Maltesh Somasekharappa in a recent 3DPI article, it’s not difficult to foresee metal printing become much quicker and easier, tackling the problem of 3s posed by Bass. In printing 3D chunks with voxel printing, objects could be grown exponentially, in the same way that 3D printing’s problems are raised to the third power. Or maybe I don’t fully understand how voxel printing or the problem of 3s really works. But, if the Universe is voxel in nature and larger printers are being built that can print new biological materials in all sorts of colors and Nietzsche was right about eternal recurrence, Bass left one prediction out of his Tarot card reading: soon, we will be able to print out the Universe itself!
