I had a vague idea of what I wanted to see and visit at 3D Printer World Expo, however I’ve learned that it’s never wise to sketch too detailed of an itinerary for a convention of this nature. Much like navigating the freeways of Los Angeles, attempting to fight against the flow of traffic was simply wasted effort. I had specific destinations in mind, but in order to get there you just have to flip on your blinker and merge right in. In the backseat of Mike’s car I’d had time to mentally prepare myself for the Expo. I was excited about going of course, I’d never been to a 3D printing convention. I was less excited about having to get up an hour earlier on a Saturday than I did during the week for my day job, but I knew it would be a worthy sacrifice.
Luckily I had conned …. I mean Mike had agreed to drive us to the Expo, so I was able to relax in his spacious (for someone much smaller than I) backseat as we made our way through one of Los Angeles’ main urban arteries, the 110 freeway. We as people are used to feeling large. Not necessarily giant, but as we live our day to day lives we become comfortable in our surroundings and begin to feel like a part of them, as if we had weight and significance within them. You don’t feel small within the confines of your regularly travelled life, you feel like you belong in it.
But even if you’re an LA native, nothing will make you feel smaller than travelling one of our main freeways. Yes, yes, everyone has freeways, but no one has freeways like Los Angeles has freeways. Labyrinthian, confusing, eternally crowded, most certainly designed by madmen and essential to living here; travelling via freeway wasn’t just something that Los Angelinos volunteered to do, it was something that we were conscripted to do. Commuting was like jousting without lances. The goal wasn’t to knock each other from our mounts, but to come as close as humanly possible to killing each other while driving at 70 miles an hour without doing so. All so we can get one car ahead, and exit one car faster. Needless to say, we arrived in Burbank relatively unscathed.
As you can clearly see from this picture, I wasn’t so much watching Mike build 3D objects virtually using the Sixense MakerVR system, I was contemplating the best way to steal the half-eaten bag of M&M’s from his front shirt pocket. My belly may have contained the 42 dollar bagel (I may have rounded up a little) that I had just consumed as we waited for the floor to open, but I needed to keep my strength up as it was going to be a long day.
After unsuccessfully liberating Mike’s M&M’s I made my way to the MakerBot booth. I’d been lured there by one of the many stunning 3D printed objects that they had on display. Makerbot had staked out perhaps the largest amount of real estate and used it very wisely. Less a booth to sell their wares and more an art installation showing off what their printers could do in the hands of the creative. Just in terms of user activity I think they clearly had the busiest spot on the floor. They understood more than anyone else there that day how important interacting with people was to the future of 3D printing, and they displayed that knowledge expertly with their well-staffed exhibit.
You couldn’t visit a booth or an art display and not have a printed object shoved in your face. From the cute little figures, iPhone cases, sculptures, coffee cups, wrenches and strange clockwork objects that varied from the simple, to the extraordinary. It’s one thing to see a picture of a 3D printed object and marvel that it’s possible, but when you touch it, its tangibility and weight feel a little miraculous. You are holding something that didn’t exist just a few hours earlier. Something with mass, and presence and meaning. Something that should still be a figment of someone’s clever imagination but was made real in a matter of hours. The amount of information and stimuli that was being thrown at us, while overwhelming, was also pretty exciting.
I learned about the need for better 3D modelling software for medical applications. The hardware is there, 3D printers can produce objects in dozens of materials, including organic ones that can mimic the human body enough to give valuable insight to a doctor about to perform surgery. Just think how much safer surgeries would be if a surgeon could 3D print an organ for dissection before he cut into the real thing? But converting the massive file of a CT scan into a 3D render is extremely time consuming and impractical. For now. But it doesn’t have to be. If I can watch life-like ear and nose prosthesis be printed, we can find someone capable of figuring out how to quickly automate the process and compress those files into a manageable size.
And perhaps it won’t be our generation that does it, but rather the next. I’d heard that 3DPWE was one of the few 3D printing events that allowed people under 18, although that is changing rapidly, so I was very interested in seeing how the younger generation would be accepted. Of course an industry event isn’t always an appropriate place for a kid, but for an industry like 3D printing, on the cusp of changing the world, it really needed the next generation to not just see how it worked but to actively be engaged in that work. I thought I’d see a handful honestly, a few interested young makers and some kids dragged along by their maker parents, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were more young people than I could count. An entire middle school maker club had shown up, lots of families and even a grandmother and the 3D printing 13-year-old apple of her eye.
I also got a chance to meet Printrbot’s Brook Drumm, who had a refreshing attitude for an industry event. Aside from being quite affable and easy to talk to, he had a great outlook on business, the 3D printing industry, and his place within it. He was also nice enough to give us a sneak peek of something really cool that I simply can’t tell you about. However I can tell you that I really want one, and that you probably will too.
But of all the fun and exciting things that I saw and learned, the most unexpected was seeing how 3D printing was being monetized now, not for large-scale manufacturing, but as a way for small businesses to make their presence known. And I don’t just mean the people who bring us the printers. On our way out of the Expo, tired and weary, Danielle had decided to get a few more pictures of the giant dinosaur head. I’d assumed that it was a Hollywood prop of some kind, and in all honesty, I hadn’t paid much attention to it the first time that we passed it. But this time the dinosaur was being guarded by a friendly Frenchman. It turns out that these weren’t Hollywood props, but replicas made for museums with exacting standards. Crea-Zaurus president Ludovic Blein explained how each model was hand assembled and painted. How they would not be possible without 3D printing. How each piece, as it was modelled, was sent to paleontologists and experts on actual prehistoric animals for their input and advice. These weren’t Hollywood monsters, they were history. Ludovic was using the technology of the future to give us a glimpse into the past.
I think that was an appropriate place to end our adventure honestly. I’d seen a lot of really cool things at the expo, met some wonderful people who are literally paving the way for us to re-make our worlds any way that we want them. You can’t help but be inspired by people like that. But inspiration isn’t real. It’s mental vaporware. It was nice to leave and be reminded that inspiration is just where it starts. It’s up to us to take that inspiration and make it tangible. It’s up to us to find a way to print a place for ourselves in this world. The future only happens when all of us move towards it, in one direction, with one goal in mind.
As we drove home on the same freeway that got us there, I felt a little different about it. The rows of red eyes that stared back at me seemed less angry. I was still small, but I felt less like we were fighting a bloodless war on that freeway and more like we were part of something bigger. Something complex and massive in scale. Something labyrinthian, confusing, crowded, designed by madmen but at the end of the day, absolutely essential to living. Although I still wanted Mike’s M&M’s.
Photos by Danielle Matich
