A 3D Printer for Everyone By Dr. Conor MacCormack

Transcription

1 A 3D Printer for Everyone By Dr. Conor MacCormack co-founder and CEO, Mcor Technologies Ltd unfettered innovation

2 A 3D Printer for Everyone 1 role in the world s foremost engineering organizations, including NASA, GE, Airbus, Nike, Ford and Honda, to name a few. For this market, the peak of hype has long passed, and businesses are deep into the reality, using high-end professional-class machines to achieve real business results. Consumer 3D printing, however, is at the pinnacle of its hype. For better understanding, I break consumer 3D printing into two sub-segments: Makers and Users. Up until this point, most of the consumer 3D printing market has been comprised of Makers. Makers are technically savvy early adopters who have gone online, purchased hobbyist 3D Dr. Conor MacCormack, co-founder & CEO, Mcor Technologies Ltd We live in exciting times. I say we ll look back on this time in history and remember it as the start of a revolution a revolution that will provide a 3D printer for everyone. Is it hype? I don t think so. The promise of 3D printing is as big as 2D printing. If we can take this hype and convert it to a technology with a purpose, the possibilities are endless. I relish our industry s challenge of creating a 3D printer for everyone, an ecosystem to support it and the true democratization of innovation. It s part of the personal quest I ve been on for most of my life: to revolutionize the way we design, innovate and communicate. printers and tinkered with the technology in large part for the joy of it. Now we re seeing a new group, Users. Users are everyday consumers, maybe less technically skilled than Makers, less driven to master every 3D aspect of 3D printing, but just as interested in the technology s ability to make things they need. Consumers have just begun to upload digital designs to stores that transform designs into physical models. These consumers constitute the bulk of the future market for 3D printers in every home provided we in the industry solve a few challenges. I am absolutely convinced we will. What we need to do So what exactly needs to happen to meet the needs of this consumer of tomorrow? To be right for every home, 3D printers will need to be faster, safer and more powerful, There s much work to be done in order to provide widely accessible 3D printing. First, let s look at where we re at today. versatile, convenient and affordable (to purchase and operate). Let s break it down: In my view, there are actually two main 3D printing segments: commercial and consumer. As the 2013 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies (next page) suggests, commercial 3D printing is firmly established, serving an essential prototyping Speed. This is a big one. Today s fastest 3D printers are actually slow when you think of the consumer even producing parts at a rate of 25 millimeters per hour. That means a Rubik s Cube takes 2.5 hours. In an age when you

3 A 3D Printer for Everyone 2 Big Data Natural-Language Question Answering Internet of Things Speech-to-Speech Translation Prescriptive Analytics Affective Computing Electrovibration Volumetric and Holographic Displays Human Augmentation Brain-Computer Interface 3D Bioprinting Quantum Computing Smart Dust Bioacoustic Sensing expectations Mobile Robots 3D Scanners Neurobusiness Biochips Autonomous Vehicles Quantified Self Consumer 3D Printing Gamification Wearable User Interfaces Complex-Event Processing Content Analytics In-Memory Database Management Systems Virtual Assistants Augmented Reality Machine-to-Machine Communication Services Mobile Health Monitoring NFC Mesh Networks: Sensor Cloud Computing Virtual Reality Enterprise 3D Printing Activity Streams Gesture Control In-Memory Analytics Biometric Authentication Methods Predictive Analytics Speech Recognition Location Intelligence Consumer Telematics As of July 2013 Innovation Trigger Peaks of Inflated Expectations Trough of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment Plateau of Productivity Plateau will be reached in: time less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years obsolete before plateau Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2013 can be touring the Smithsonian in the time it takes to tap your iphone, consumers will expect 3D printed parts to be made in minutes. That s the goal I m setting for this industry. It s ambitious, I know, but not out of the bounds of possibility. competition and economies of scale will bring professionalclass, consumer 3D printing within the reach of everyone who can afford a TV, computer or rent today. It happened with document printers. Materials. Consumers will dictate applications and applications will dictate material requirements. There s a twist to the affordability problem. Most 3D printer companies operate on the razor and blade business model: sell the core equipment at an attractive price and mark up The 3D printer of the future will use new materials to create models of astonishing properties extreme strength, wired (with printed circuits, processors and batteries), or implantable in the human body. As engineers well know, material properties are extremely important. For instance, will the replacement handle for your saucepan stand up to repeated heating, cooling and hoisting of heavy contents? the supplies. Well, we re now seeing extremely high markups on 3D printing build material 100 times or more. This model punishes the user for using the equipment and directly contradicts the whole point of 3D printing for designers and engineers: printing multiple iterations of a design until the design is perfect. I believe that for a 3D printer to reach the home these differentials need to reduce considerably. If not, it could be painful to find out. Safety. As an industry, we re all responsible for making 3D Affordability. Although we re still above the sweet spot, the prices of 3D printers, as well as the materials they use, will steadily fall even as the quality rises. I believe heated printers safe for consumers. We ll need to create 3D printers that operate with benign materials at temperatures that don t stray too far from that of the room, or at least safely shield

4 A 3D Printer for Everyone 3 the heat from users and their environments. Once printed, the models will need to be ready for use without requiring sharp tools or chemicals to clean them up or any cleanup at all, for that matter. From start to finish, consumer 3D printing will need to be safe, clean and automated. Professional quality. The devil s in the details. Consider a parent who wants to create a 3D miniature likeness of her child. The 3D printer of the future will need to produce a model that actually looks like her child with the same laugh lines, furrowed brow and cheek bones. Remember dotmatrix document printers? That s the quality level where the Eco-friendliness. This concern goes hand in hand with safety. Consumers will rightly demand that their 3D printers majority of the consumer 3D printers are today. 3D printers will see the same leaps. including the device s components, the materials used, the fabrication process and any required cleanup be easy on the environment. Reliability. Your car just starts. Your TV just flashes on. Your document printer just prints. And 3D printers of the future will just pump out models. No more worry about whether you ve Color. Consumers will rightly expect their 3D printers to offer the same infinite gamut at the same resolution they enjoy in their created a watertight solid. The 3D printer of the future needs to guide consumers to success, automatically, every time. color document printers and in the products they purchase from stores every day. You don t watch black and white TV, do you? We think, see, design and dream in color. Ecosystem. What I have described thus far has been focused on the 3D printers themselves, but that is just one part of what is needed for mass consumer 3D printing. Just as the ipod relies on a vast content store from which to buy your music, the 3D printer of the future will be part of a lush ecosystem of content and capabilities. And this ecosystem needs to develop at the same rate as the machines. Elements of the necessary ecosystem include: Monochrome and full-color versions of the same 3D model. Design software. Computer-aided design software used to be too complex for anyone but designers and Ease of use. The 3D printer of the future will shield consumers from all the complexity of designing a new object. engineers. Now a kid can create 3D shapes with a finger on a tablet. We need to refine these capabilities. We also need to give users unfettered power to invent things from their imagination as well as the practical ability to capture 3D images of the real-world objects they want to replicate. Remember, on a document printer it s no harder to print a drawing of a jet engine than a recipe for chicken soup. The printer doesn t care; it just prints. 3D printing needs to offer the same ease of use. Let s use a toaster analogy: you pop in a slice of bread (your file), press the button and a few minutes later, out pops your toast your printed model! Scanning. The ability to make shapes on a screen doesn t make you an inventor any more than a word processor makes you James Joyce. So consumers may need ways to capture the shape of an existing object so the 3D printer can replicate it. Scanning is the way. Off-the-shelf gaming devices and even smartphones are steadily acquiring scanning capabilities to generate 3D data.

5 A 3D Printer for Everyone 4 Downloadable designs. If you don t design a model or scan an object, you ll want to download a design and customize it. Numerous websites let you do this today. They will proliferate, and someday you will be able to download designs for replacement parts for your home, furniture and appliances. or toxic waste. We use water-based adhesive, water-based ink and regular office paper as the materials, producing professional-quality models as durable and safe as wood. Nor does our 3D printer require any kind of dangerous postprocessing. You simply pull away bits of paper with your fingers or common tweezers and recycle the scrap along with any models you no longer need. As far as affordability, Mobile apps. You ll be able to scan objects with your smartphone and link to a 3D printer at home. Imagine watching a video of Tutankhamen on your no one s materials are as low in cost and ubiquitous as ours. And our color gamut is as extensive as any document printer because we employ inkjet printing technology for our color. phone, hitting print, and finding the pharaoh s newly fabricated bust on your printer ready for display. As a company and an industry, we ve progressed faster than I ever thought we would. Already, if you don t have access to Retail. Before everyone has a 3D printer, everyone will use 3D printers through retail stores. In fact, a few of them are already offering 3D printers and print-ondemand services. Consumers will use this channel until we ve delivered on the other capabilities I ve outlined in this article. Getting there a professional-quality, full-color 3D printer, Staples can print you what you need. Today. Here we go So that s my vision. But it s only mine. As 3D printing gets into consumers hands, they, as much as me and my brother, will provide the vision and be the innovators. This is an exciting set of challenges. It s going to take a lot of time and a lot of work. But so did the evolution of Henry Ford s Model T into an F1 racer, or the evolution of computing Until then, let the hype abound. The reality of revolution is upon us. There will be a 3D printer for everyone. Let s enjoy the ride! from IBM s early mainframe to Google Glass. Dr. Conor MacCormack is co-founder and CEO of Mcor This is the vision I ve embraced since 2005 when my brother, Fintan, and I scratched out our design for a 3D printer on the back of a napkin. And this vision explains why we ensured our 3D printer would be safe from the first prototype. So we built one that spares the user things we don t want in our homes, e.g., heat, chemicals, fumes, airborne microparticles Technologies, maker of the world s only 3D printer that uses ordinary business paper. MacCormack has a doctorate degree in finite element analysis from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland Mcor Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. Mcor IRIS is a trademark and Mcor Technologies Ltd is a registered trademark of Mcor Technologies Ltd. All other company and product names are pending trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. VP-WP