Will 3D Printing Have a Larger Economic Impact Than the Internet

Will 3D Printing Have a Larger Economic Impact Than the Internet

We are in the midst of exponential growth within the industry, and although I’m sure we will have obstacles come about along the way, the next decade is going to be an exciting one, not only for 3D printing, but for multiple technologies which are able to take advantage of the backbone of the internet, Big Data, and exponentially increasing computer power. How fast the market will expand is anyone’s guess — just like the internet’s growth was impossible to foretell in the ’90s.

What are your thoughts on Sammartino’s incredible predictions? Discuss in the Economic Impact of 3D Printing Forum thread on 3DPB.com.

Back in the late 1990s when the internet began creeping its way into homes and businesses, it was impossible to foretell the economic impact that it eventually would have on society as a whole. While estimates of its annual impact on the economy are all over the place, anywhere from $3 trillion to $6 trillion worldwide, one thing is for sure: it’s a game changer. In 2012, it was estimated that 4.7% of all US economic activity was the result of the internet. Three years later and this number has surely grown.

If you were to have asked me a few years ago if in our lifetime we’d see a technology as important to the world economy as the internet has been and continues to be, I likely would have said ‘no.’ Here we are in 2015 and I could probably name a couple technologies that may end up being as impactful as the internet has been. One such technology is 3D printing. Steve Sammartino, a digital entrepreneur, business adviser, and venture capitalist seems to agree with me on this one.

In a recent article written by Sarah Sedghi and Eleanor Hall, and published by ABC News in Australia, Sammartino made quite the prediction about the potential economic impact that 3D printing will have on our global economy. In fact, he believes that it will have a larger impact than even the internet has had, which certainly is saying something.

Steve Sammartino

“It’s just a little bit like the internet. When it arrived we thought, ‘Oh, that may be interesting for media’, but as we’ve seen it’s transformed every type of business no matter what industry,” Sammartino explained to ABC News. “The internet is an important part of our business, and 3D printing, while we can’t see exactly how that might manifest itself, there’s no doubt that it’ll change everything we do from just simple operations and the spaces we work in and in unforeseeable ways it’ll impact, I think, most businesses.”

So, the question is: Could 3D printing have as significant an impact on the global economy in the coming decade as the internet has had? Considering that in the US alone, the manufacturing sector generates approximately $2 trillion annually, and that eventually a large portion of manufacturing in this country and abroad will rely at least partially on 3D printing, Sammartino may be on to something. The United States in 2012 accounted for 17.4% of all manufacturing. That means that the global manufacturing sector is worth around $11.5 trillion annually.

Considering that the manufacturing sector is only a portion of what the total 3D printing industry will consist of, it’s very possible that Sammartino’s prediction could in fact be correct. It will certainly take time before 3D printing becomes mainstream enough to even comes close to achieving the $3 to $6 trillion estimated economic impact that the Internet currently is responsible for. In fact, we would need to see at least a 100,000% rise in the adoption rate by manufacturers as current estimates for the total value of the 3D printing space sit at around $3 billion.

“Even the way our homes are furnished will change and the type of things that we print at home. It’ll even have an impact on our foods — we’ll be 3D printing food. Smart brands will be selling components,” explains Sammartino. “Just like the ink jet printers get sold, you might have a chocolate company selling you the ingredients that go into your 3D printing machine to print things exactly the way that you want.”

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HP Unveils 3-D Printer and Desktop PC

Hewlett-Packard tried to reassert itself as a technology innovator on Wednesday, unveiling two products — a fast 3-D printer for large companies and an interactive desktop computer for consumers.

Both machines are part of HP’s printing and personal systems division, which will be spun out into its own company, HP Inc., next year.

The products are seen as key to the company’s push into what it calls “blended reality,” technology that bridges the gap between three-dimensional reality and two-dimensional images on screens. And as the first products unveiled by HP’s consumer hardware company, they help set the tone for the business as a whole.

When our physical world and digital world comes together, that’s when magic happens,” said Dion Weisler, executive vice president of printing and personal systems, at a Wednesday morning event in New York. “When inputs and outputs are seamless. Imagine thought to expression in an instant.”

Into the future

Weisler, who will become CEO of HP Inc., said he believes the two products will lead HP into the future.

HP said its new 3-D printer for businesses can produce parts and gears at high quality, 10 times faster and at a more affordable price than its competitors. Using a technology called Multi Jet Fusion, the machine can produce objects in color and manipulate their form, texture, strength, elasticity, friction as well as electrical and thermal properties, the company said.

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Pushing the 3D Printer to the Limit: Zealot Prints Amazing 3mm Tall Miniatures

What exactly are the limits of 3D printers today? We know that objects are limited in size on the upper end by the 3D printer’s build volume. 

If a build volume is 12 cubic centimeters, then you can’t print anything larger than 12 cubic centimeters on that printer. With this said, you never really come across people who ask about how small of an object, a 3D printer can accurately print. With consumer and prosumer level 3D printers, such as the FDM and SLA based machines which are most common today, you don’t see too many people striving to create extremely small objects. 

FDM based 3D printers are limited in scope more so than SLA printers because they just can’t achieve the same detailed print resolutions as their counterparts. This brings up the question of what exactly are the limitations on the higher resolution SLA 3D printers?

One man, and his company Zealot Miniatures is changing the ideology that people have when it comes to the capabilities of 3D printers in creating miniature objects. Eddie J Fisher, of Zealot Miniatures tells 3DPrint.com that his company has been using 3D printing to create very small models and parts for clients for half a decade.

 

“We use 3D printers to produce the digitally designed models and have been doing this for around 5 years now,” Fisher told us. “Using these prints we use them as masters when using traditional resin casting methods to produce batches of resin miniatures.”

Zealot Miniatures is known for their models, and aftermarket parts, as well as their scenery and conversion kits for miniatures. Most of their models are in the realm of Sci-Fi and fantasy, but they also do a decent amount of custom modeling for clients. Just recently, Fisher was asked to create a miniature Navy crew member for a client who is producing a model warship. He wanted to have multiple crew members on board as part of the model. So, Fisher and team went to work.

“It (the Navy crew member) was sculpted by Bob Naismith (somewhat of a legend among miniature circles) and printed on our newest printer, the B9 Creator v1.2 which features a 1080p projector for amazing new resolution, higher than all of the out-the-box EnvisionTEC machines,” said Fisher. “I’m printing at XY:30 microns and Z:15 microns!”

As you can see in the image above, the print is quite amazing, especially for being only 3mm in height. However, Fisher admits that he created an STL file which featured very little detail because he did not believe it would come out all that successful. “So I didn’t use a higher detail file, but actually the print came out pretty much exactly like the file, and I think if I reprint this with a higher detail STL, I can get a lot more details on the print,” he told us.

The STL file used

This print is just a test. Fisher plans to make some modifications prior to creating the final product. For those who were wondering, the Navy crew member was printed at a 1:600 scale. The entire warship, for this crew member to stand on will also be created by Fisher, who plans to have it printed out and ready for casting next week. It should be interesting to see how the final product turns out.

What do you think of these 3mm tall miniatures, that have been printed on the B9 Creator 3D Printer? Are you surprised by what it was capable of, or is this what you would expect from a higher end prosumer SLA 3D printer? Discuss the 3D Printed Miniatures forum thread on 3DPB.com.

Ready To Download Your Next Pair Of Shoes? How 3D Printing Is Turning Bits Into Atoms

Remember how, in "Star Trek," Play video Captain Picard could tell a computer "tea, Earl Grey, hot" and, voilà, out of thin air, a hot, Early Grey tea would appear on a tray?

That computer was called a Replicator. What it did was use software made of bits to create objects made of atoms.

Believe it or not, replicators of a sort have already existed outside of science fiction for years.
The truth is, we've been turning atoms into bits and bits into atoms for more than a decade now. Music used to be recorded by carving physical groves into records. These grooves vibrated a needle tunefully, and a funnel amplified the volume. Now, that atoms-oriented process has been replaced by software — the creation and reading of bits.

More recently, we've seen the advent of gadgets that are almost exactly like the Replicators in Star Trek. They're called 3D printers. There are lots of different types of 3D printers, but one company, MakerBot, is actually selling them to consumers.

Their brand name?

Play video The Replicator.

They aren't making hot tea yet. But you can download all kinds of objects from the Internet — including toys, tools, and art — and use 3D printers to fabricate them in your home.
Someday you might be able to download your next pair of shoes from the Internet, and use a 3D printer to make them yourself. Someday, most of the physical objects you own might come together this way.

Obviously, that potential has huge consumer and business applications. Mike Maples, an influential early stage startup investor in Silicon Valley, spends a lot of time thinking about how them — and how technology is turning "atoms into bits" and back again.

Here's a lightly-edited interview with Maples on the topic.

The idea that technology will soon turn "atoms into bits" is one I first heard from you. Could you explain what you mean?

“Atoms to bits” describes a tendency of products to transform from physical and constrained to virtual and unconstrained. The most obvious early example was music. It used to exist as a physical good (LP records), but over time transitioned into a bit-based product when it became possible to capture music in a file and copy and distribute it effortlessly.

We believe that the transition from atoms to bits will occur in a wider range of product categories over the next decade, enabled by new technology breakthroughs like 3D printing. 

This feels like something out of "The Jetsons" or "Star Trek." How did technology have to progress to the point where it's realistic to talk about all this?

The technology business is magical — it guarantees us a doubling of computing performance every 18-24 months. This exponential curve makes the power of our technology increase a million-fold every generation. For instance, once you could turn a song into bits, it was only a matter of a few years before you could do the same with a DVD movie, and more recently a Blu-Ray movie, or a home movie shot in 1080p from your iPhone. 

But the bigger idea is that exponential advances in the next generation will allow an entire range of products to transform from atoms to bits — products that most people do not imagine today. Various industries will be impacted by this, not just the media and entertainment businesses.

When do you think we'll start seeing consumer application of this technology?

Applications are already widespread in media and entertainment, but they will spread.

When I was spending time at Singularity University, Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, gave a very interesting talk about 3D printing. He described how people are already starting to develop technologies to print in rubber, plastic, and metal.

He gave an example of 3D printing applied to sneakers. Today, Nike makes more than 500 million pairs of shoes a year. Imagine if, instead of them being made in China, they were instead printed on a 3D printer? The process of purchasing a shoe would be like buying an “app” that contained a 3D CAD file for the shoe which could be printed directly. Would this printer exist in a shoe store, a future Kinko’s, or even in someone’s living room? That’s hard to guess.

Further out into the future, I have seen teams at Stanford who are working on the ability to print a human organ, which would be transformational for even more obvious reasons.

Turning objects into software raises serious piracy questions, doesn't it?

Turning objects into software raises a lot of very interesting questions about industry disruption. Piracy is an issue, but there are even more fundamental structural implications.

For example, if Nike develops the ability to “print” a pair of shoes, what does this mean for manufacturing? Could manufacturing be re-defined and migrate back to the U.S.? 

And, as you point out, it raises big concerns about piracy. It’s very counter-intuitive to think that a pair of shoes might one day be stolen from Bit Torrent to be printed illegally in a consumer’s home while nobody is watching. 

When Carl was discussing 3D printing, a movie executive was in the audience and he joked “Finally! Someone other than the music and movie industries are going to get ripped off! We’ll see if people take piracy seriously then!” 

But overall it seems like a very positive, empowering trend. In the case of music, people forget that the industry used to have to build factories to mass-produce music, with all of their attendant physical costs as well as the externality costs of pollution and waste. In the shoe example, the product could be recycled and re-printed, which could change the carbon footprint of shoe manufacturing along with the core economics of making and distributing shoes.

When Carl gave his talk on 3D printing, he said that technology is like the [parking lot exit] signs that say “Don’t back up. Severe tire damage.” That reminds me of the future opportunities we are likely to see. The task is to keep moving forward with a proactive sense of the possible. The option to move backwards is not really available to us, regardless of who might feel threatened or try to stop it.

What are some exciting consumer applications you envision?

Every physical thing that is designed and built today could be a target. We discussed media and shoes, but people in academia are also experimenting with printing buildings — the opportunities are quite broad.

How are you investing around this opportunity?

Our basic metaphor is that physical products are tending to transition from “ice” to “liquid” to “vapor.” 

Taking music as an example, the “ice” phase was when all of the music had to be purchased as a physical LP. The “liquid” phase started when recordable media made it possible to make analog recordings of music on audiotapes. The “gas” phase occurred when it became practical to make high-quality digital copies of music. This is when music became an uncontrollable virtual good that forced the music industry to re-think its entire business model. 

We are looking for enabling technologies that allow products to change their “states” and when we find these technologies, we try to ask which product categories are likely to be affected first. But in terms of the specific areas, we are keeping that a secret for now!

3D Printing Grows Up, Can Now Arm Itself

The 3D printing world is still in its infancy, which is kind of cool. There are entire communities of people devoted to this hobby, and it’s a bit of a close-knit society. It kind of reminds me of the ham radio clubs my father used to love.

People who participate in 3D printing create all kinds of interesting devices using computer-aided design programs and then create them in the real world using reams of ABS plastic that feeds the printers. Printer enthusiasts are rated based on their creation skill, and once a design is working, it can be passed around and printed on other 3D printers, just like normal documents. The repository at Thingiverse is probably the biggest place to show off these inventions.

Government has also gotten into the action, with small steps like the portable explosives detector that works with a modified inkjet printer, and bigger efforts such as the Obama administration’s $60 million initiative into researching the technology. And the Army is deploying mobile labs that can 3D-print gear for soldiers in Afghanistan.

So this relatively small cadre of 3D-printing enthusiasts is about to get a lot bigger. In fact, I predict that 3D printing will likely be the next big thing. A showroom for 3D printers just opened up in California, with prices for some models on sale for as low as $600. And someone figured out how to make a working gun on a 3D printer, something that will for sure get the government’s interest.

Until very recently, it was thought that only toys and models could be created on these printers. However, someone figured out that not only is the ABS plastic strong enough to support all the firing pressures associated with a gun but that the weapon could be used over and over again without jamming, melting or otherwise blowing up. If you don’t believe it, here is a video of the printed weapon firing at a range.

Now, just to clarify a few things. The weapon is based on an AR-15, which is a civilian version of the M16. The weapon created on the 3D printer was chambered to fire .22 caliber rounds, which are less powerful and thus less stressful on the weapon than almost all other ammo.

And the weapon in the video only had its lower receiver printed, though the creator says on his blog he plans to go back and print an entire weapon for his next test. And besides, it’s the lower receiver that is actually regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the part that most 3D printing modelers didn’t think could work inside an actual firearm.

I don’t know if the government will suddenly want to start regulating 3D printers now, but it’s a safe bet that the small, hobbyist community of today may be numbered as more people rush into the fold. And the Army’s mobile labs in Afghanistan might soon be able to print out more than just parts and other gear.

Think about how useful this technology could be if it were perfected. Need a tool? Need a weapon? Need a part for a wonky machine? No problem. Just push print. It may not be a replicator like on Star Trek, but it’s a good first step.