I’ve been seeing a lot of talks about 3D printing lately. This got me curious so I decided to do some research about it.

I didn’t find it that interesting at first, but after I watched this TED talk, I was convinced that 3D printing could really change the world:

Apparently, 3D printing technology had been around since the 1980s. We just didn’t hear much about it until recently because they were inefficient, big, and very expensive. This reminds me of the days before personal computing became mainstream. It used to be just the big corporations, universities, and government agencies who had access to computers. Now many of us have one in our pockets.

There are so many things you could do with this technology that the possibilities seem endless. As they become better and cheaper, everyone will have one at home. Instead of buying items online and having to wait for them to be shipped to us, eventually we will just buy the digital model online, click “print”, and watch the item get built in front of us in minutes.

A company called Formlabs actually just put up a project on KickStarter recently to fund the development of an affordable 3D printer that can create high quality objects for a much lower cost than existing 3D printers on the market. They hit their target of $100,000 in 1 day. At the time of this writing, the pledge is at over $1.8 million dollars with still 16 days left to go.

Here are some applications of this technology:

• Rapid prototyping. For product designers, instead of waiting for your design to come back from China to have it molded, you can just print it where you are right away, see if it turned out as you hoped, make improvements and print again if you’re not happy with it. There’s actually a service now called Shapeways where designers can upload their design, have them printed, and even sell the item produced by their design right there on the website if they want.
• Replacement parts. Can’t find a replacement part for that product you bought 10 years ago? Don’t throw it away just yet. Scan the broken part and print it. Jay Leno actually does this already for his antique car collection. Eventually manufacturers will just have the digital model of the replacement part online ready for download to be printed at home. No need to keep spare parts in stock.
• Cheaper and better fitting prosthetics. Bespoke uses 3D printing and scanning technology to make prosthetics more affordable and customized to fit the wearer perfectly.
• Creating complex models that are impossible to do by hand. Because of the very high-precision that 3D printers are capable of, architects can now build models of very complex structures. 3D printers are also enabling doctors to build models of complex organs to study them or to practice operating on them (for surgeons).
• Cooler toys. Disney engineers were able to use 3D printers to create “printed optics.” Just watch this video and you’ll know what I mean by cool.
• Replacement organs. Watch this TED video and you’ll be amazed that this is actually possible now. They were printing a human kidney during the talk using living cells. It might still take years before it’s widely used. But it will eventually happen and you will no longer have to answer that question on whether you’d like to donate your organs when you apply for a driver’s license.
• Teleportation. A hundred or so years from now, I have feeling 3D printing will play a big role in teleporting people. A person can be scanned from point A and printed to point B. I know teleportation sounds crazy, but there are very smart people out there who believe this is in fact possible.

3D printing technology will only get better and as that happens, I’m sure people will find more creative ways to use it that are currently unimaginable.

It will change the way things are created, distributed, and consumed. It will let us customize everything. It may even be good for the environment. Maybe someone will come up with a device that will recycle an item into the original materials that was used to build it for reuse. It will eliminate the need to keep spare parts as you can print them as needed. Instead of throwing things away when they break, you just fix it yourself by printing and replacing the broken part, or recycle the entire thing and reprint a new one.

This technology could also give us a healthier and longer life. Failed organs can be replaced with a printed one. You wouldn’t have to wait for an organ donor or pay a ton of money to an organ smuggler. We may not even need surgeons in the future. Just like in the movies (e.g. Prometheus), machines that will allow you to operate on yourself might actually just exist. It may even happen sooner than we think.