The 3-D Printing Market Will Be Huge. 3-D Printing Will Change the World. To anyone who hasn’t seen it demonstrated, 3-D printing sounds futuristic—like the meals that materialized in the Jetsons’ oven at the touch of a keypad.
But the technology is quite straightforward: It is a small evolutionary step from spraying toner on paper to putting down layers of something more substantial (such as plastic resin) until the layers add up to an object. And yet, by enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in a new era. As applications of the technology expand and prices drop, the first big implication is that more goods will be manufactured at or close to their point of purchase or consumption. This might even mean household-level production of some things.
(You’ll pay for raw materials and the IP—the software files for any designs you can’t find free on the web.) Chris Anderson: How the Makers Will Create a New Industrial Revolution. New MIT 3-D Printing Innovations Create Printable Objects That Assemble Themselves. When Skylar Tibbits drops a plastic-like rod into a tub of water, it starts to take shape, turning into a cube.
It’s a result of what he calls 4-D printing, which adds the fourth dimension, time, to the increasingly popular process of 3-D printing. Over the time dimension, the objects self-assemble.