3D printing technology can be dangerous when people start to use the technique to 3D print weapons. Company 3D TEK agrees, but wants to focus on the positive possibilities of the technique. They came up with what can be called a heartwarming Christmas story on 3D printing. After graduation, graduates often receive yearbooks with photo material to remember each other. And even if they don’t get something like that, there’s still Facebook, enabling us all to stay in contact. However, blind and visually impaired can’t use yearbooks or social media, because of their inability to see.
3D TEK therefore came up with 3D printed yearbooks for the visually impaired. These yearbooks are touchable and feature 3D printed busts of students with their names in braille in front of them. Students who are not able to see can now discover what their fellow students look like and remember them in a special way. The busts can easily be made thanks to 3D scanning technology, where objects or people can get scanned into a 3D model which can be 3D printed right away.
The company went to the Seoul National School for the Blind to try out their idea during the students’s graduation day. More than 2,000 people gathered and they all seemed to be impressed by the 3D printed Yearbooks. In the video you can see that it has been emotional for the students to get a yearbook which was specially designed for them: the people who aren’t able to use their eyes in the way we do.
The company now wants to look at options to distribute these 3D printed yearbook on a wider scale. One of their main goals is to show that 3D printing can lead to positive news stories, and they surely did with this moving story for Christmas Day. On behalf of the 3dprinting.com team we would like to wish all of our readers around the world a merry Christmas!
Image credits: 3D TEK.