Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A while back, I had written a blog explaining what 3D printing is . That blog focused on how 3D printing works; and what it can (and cannot) be used to print. What the blog did not do was to go into the potential impact of such a technology. I had assumed that it was just going to be a way to allow individuals to print one-off products and niche objects. But what if 3D printing is going to be far more transformative than that, wonders Clive Thompson . What if it increases how well we understand things simply because we can put a 3D model in front of us that helps us visualize, and thereby understand? In other words, would 3D printing help the way 3D models help architects? “When the visualization is physical, it has a haptic impact that screens do not. You learn new things. That’s why architects build scale models of their buildings: Only by peering around a structure do you “get” what’s going on. “You see these spatial relations and depth of field that aren’t possible onscreen...

3D printing is supposed to be so revolutionary that it will move us away from the mass production lines to customizable, one-off production. But what is 3D printing really? What can it really print? How much of it is just hype? To answer those questions, let’s first see how it works . Just as good old 2D printing requires something like a Word doc, 3D printing requires a 3D file called a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file. You can create a CAD file from scratch or you could scan an existing object using a 3D scanner and then edit the file to suit your needs or you can just get 3D files as-is from the Net for free. As you might have guessed, there are several free tools on the Net for editing such files. Ok, so you have the 3D file ready. The way it gets printed is called “additive manufacturing”. Huh? Let’s first understand the opposite of that. When Michelangelo was asked how he sculpted David, his response was: “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.” ...