Time has come for consumers now to also get acqainted with 3d Printers. On the yearly Csonumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the New York based company Makerbot Industries introduced a 2 color 3d-Printer; the Replicator.

Replicator 3D Printer

It is priced around $1400. That makes it in reach for consumers. (even the first Apple PCs were more expensive!). This new generation 3d Printer makes product with measures 320 x 487 x 381 mm. The Replicator weighs around 13 kilo’s. And you do not need a PC to control it. You can use a SD card or USB-stick (with Linux, Windows and OSX. The Replicator builds products with a speed of 40mm per second.

As they stated:

‘We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.’

That might be true. But whether people will risk huge fines for doing so depends on how the post-SOPA legal story turns out.

For a designer like Iris, making these dresses with the use of 3D printing is a totally new way of working. Now, she had to wait until the dresses were printed to finally see what she’s been working on for months. There was no adjusting along the way or knowing what the end product will look like until it was fully printed.

None the less, this collection looks amazing. With her Micro collection, Iris had the guts to show new possibilities within the unforgiving world that’s called fashion and while doing that, she also showed 3D printing can be used for nearly anything.

Essential Dynamics created the Imagine 3D Printer. This good looking machine can print a whole range of materials, including chocolate, silicone, cheese, epoxy, organics.. I can go on for a while but as the Essential Dynamics team claims: “It’s a syringe based design. If it extrudes, it prints.”. And it does it fast. The Imagine can print a chocolate cupcake under two minutes.

The Imagine printer comes fully assembled but has a long pre-order list so if you’re craving for one, be fast and order now.

The OrcaM can scan objects as wide as 80 cm and as heavy as 100 kg. The scan that comes out is in full color and contains detailed texture.

With the OrcaM you can now make a very accurate of all fragile art or objects and if they break, just print out a new one!

The next video shows how the Germans get it to work

This is a great interview that shows the development in the personal 3D printer market and the differences between the open-source product of MakerBot and the closed-source product of 3D Systems.

Recent work by Vivek Goyal, Professor of Electrical Engineering and his group at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, goes even further than the Kinect. They are momentarily developing a device that provides more-accurate depth information and has a greater range. The most promising thing is that this device is so small, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into a cellphone at very little extra cost.

How it works

The MIT team developed an algorithm which measures the time of flight of photons using a cheap photodetector and an ordinary analog-to-digital converter — an off-the-shelf component already found in all cellphones.  Also the algorithm is simple enough to run on the type of processor ordinarily found in a smartphone.

The device is still a work in progress but the telecom giant Qualcomm sees enough promise in the technology that it selected the team as one of eight winners — out of 146 applicants from a select group of universities — of a $100,000 grant through its 2011 Innovation Fellowship program.

In the next video professor Goyal explains it further.

Before Thingiverse became ‘Thingiverse, a universe of things’ in 2008, people were able to download music, movies and e-books. There was no place to share and download ‘things’. After this radical change back in 2008, Thingiverse quickly developed into the most powerful sharing platform for digital designs on the web.

Of course, after two years the website became a bit dated so a re-launch was more than welcome. With the improvements it’s easier than ever to share your digital designs with the world. Also the new website gives credit to the best designers in the community on the front page. If your design is worthy enough, you can now become real famous, real fast!

You can visit the all new Thingiverse website here

In collaboration with Materialise CMF, the team of surgeons completed the pre-operative planning  for both the donor (who gave bone, muscles, veins, nerves and skin) and the recipient. A digital representation of the patient’s anatomy was created using CT data. In order to put the surgical plan into action, anatomical models and patient specific surgical guides were 3D printed for use before and during the operation. The 3D printed guides were used during the procedure to aid the surgeons and allow  them to realize the surgical plan they had created.

The surgery was completed successfully and remarkably the patient is making such great recovery that he regained the ability to speak only six days into recovery.