It must be said that one of the Next Big Things has to be desktop fabrication. We have already extended the computing revolution to personal manufacturing for print, for imprinting certain kinds of fabric, for media like CD's and DVD's.
The ante is being raised. This desktop model has been available for less than a year, and early adopters have been exploring dozens of applications. There remains a lot of research left to do:
- Design software
- Materials for building up "printed" items in a variety of circumstance (analogy to typ4es of inks for different applications?)
- Hardware simplification and durability
- Commodity design - new ways to look at products that must be assembled in this new way
This video provides a good look at where we are and what's possible. Produced - and link provided - by the Wall St Journal.
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