Futurist Thomas Frey: In March, when Facebook announced the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, they not only put a giant stamp of approval on the technology, but they also triggered an instant demand for virtual reality designers, developers, and engineers.
3D printing is one of those new things that gets hyped all the damn time. Retail UPS stores carrying pay-per-use printers, MakerBots in every school, a “new brick in the Great Wall,” and guns, guns, guns, to name a few examples. (Video)
3D bioprinting has made new headway recently in fabricating blood vessels. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a method for 3D printing biological material using magnetically controlled robots.
Advances in robotics and 3D printing are improving people’s lives.
Thanks to an international collaboration between universities such as Colorado State University, the Technical University of Munich and the Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, a paralyzed teen is set to open this year’s World Cup by kicking a football while wearing a motorized exoskeleton controlled by his or her brain. (Video)
Futurist Thomas Frey: A couple weeks ago I turned 60. I remember how old 60 was when I was a kid, and now I’m here.
As a person who spends a lot of time asking “what if” questions, constantly thinking about extreme possibilities, the notion of 3D printing a replacement body for myself became very intriguing.
I remember seeing science fiction movies where cloned bodies were grown over long periods of time, and more recent ones with accelerated cloning technology, but the 3D printing of replacement bodies is a faster option, just now coming into view.
Bioprinting is the process of using 3D printers to form human tissue. This process that has already been used to print replacement kidneys, bladders, livers, skin, bones, teeth, noses, and ears, as well as prosthetic arms and legs. This is a list that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, but is now growing on a regular basis.
Grace Choi decided to disrupt the beauty industry when she was attending Harvard Business School. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create and then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors. (Video)
Multimaterial 3-D printing – a complex lattice using different inks.
3D printing capabilities are rather limited despite the excitement that 3-D printing has generated. It can be used to make complex shapes, but most commonly only out of plastics. Even manufacturers using an advanced version of the technology known as additive manufacturing typically have expanded the material palette only to a few types of metal alloys. But what if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing and matching the “inks” with precision?
Old-fashioned casts for broken bones can smell and cause itching. But 3D printed casts can take care of those issues. Deniz Karasahin has designed the next step: a custom cast with an ultrasound device to speed up bone healing.
A closeup of a titanium lattice ball manufactured using a 3D printing process.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has identified ten ways to transform how space missions put together in their investigation of the potential of additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D printing.
In Shanghai, China, the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Company claims to have 3D printed ten houses with inexpensive industrial scraps in 24 hours. (Photos)
Just e-mail ourselves 3-D printable files of our stuff.
Janne Kyttanen, a Finnish designer and creative director of 3D Systems, has vastly improved on the concept of luggage. He thinks we can just e-mail ourselves 3-D printable files of our stuff. If we go by his new project Lost Luggage, the era of suitcase-schlepping may soon be over.