After warnings from retired Engineers and seasoned VCs, the World has reached peak hype in 3D Printing. All those Kickstarter campaigns for 3D printers, all those busy CAD artists, all those blog writers who talk endlessly about it (noooo), are going to hit a brick wall. No more cool materials, no more cool designs, no more quicker and smoother 3D printing. Clearly we are in a rapid descent into the ol’ smelly trash heap of hyped products, filled with Segways, New Cokes and Nintendo Virtual Boys. At least, all according to this infographic.
Not all Hype is Made Equal
Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle Special Report covers all the past, present and future trends and places them on a simple graph with expectation and time as axes. 3D Printing has gone from being an useful thing to have in an office or research lab to ‘Replicators in your home”, aided by gullible media groups (myself included, although I take pains to learn) and pushed by those getting into the business. Gartner, this is one awesome looking graph.
BUT. Maybe you’re assumptions are off. Carefully read every technology listed there. What does ‘Home Health Monitoring’ and ‘3D Printing’ have in common. Or Near-Field Communication, or Biometric Authentication Methods. They don’t. They have nothing in common. So why would they should they follow the same path? I call SHENANIGANS on this graph (if only to write, but also to because I’m right – I asked the Magic 8 Ball – look!)
The Best is Yet to Come
There is a lot of hype around 3D printing. Half of what I read is mostly re-hashing of rather inane claims (we can print food – no we can’t, we’re hooking up condiments to used CNC machines – thats not printing, that’s dispensing). The other half that I read (and try to report) is groundbreaking stuff that will catalyze further invention, innovation and investment. New technologies are not made equal – some really exist as a family of closely related products that will split off into their own categories. Alot of the crazy cool stuff I’ve been seeing has been going on behind the scenes. Combining metal and plastic printing to product full-on electronics (ie/ Optomec and Rhys Jones work) or developments in large-scale 3D printing (DShape, Voxeljet and Contour Crafting) are going to have very different and uneven impacts in completely different markets – and many years from approaching revived hype. In the early 1980s, there wasn’t that much difference in the mind of the Public between ‘Servers’ and “Personal Computers” even though they are very very different – and (most) of the Public knows better.
The fact is, 3D Printing is such a huge family of technologies that new developments will be coming and going for years, maybe decades, to come. So I’d like to say to Gartner, if you want to slam 3D Printing for being hyped, re-label that as “Desktop 3D Printing” – that would be something I could agree with. It gives the rest of us a bad name.
Source: Gartner
