Dirk Vander Kooij, winner of the 2011 Dutch Design Award, has developed a very elegant solution to all that trash sitting around. YES, you know where I’m going with this. Why should it be sitting around, when it could be doing something useful. Like being sat upon?
Hollywood seems to have a love/hate relationship with 3D Printing. And who doesn’t love/hate Hollywood? Daniel Terdiman at CNET wrote a piece called “Why Hollywood Loves 3D Printing.” Its a great piece about how 3D printing is speeding up the production process and improving prop-making.
Another step towards 3D printed electronics was taken recently – Stratasys and Optomec have been working together to develop a method whereby conductive material is deposited in a design. This has been the holy grail of 3D printing for a number of reasons.
Just when you thought 3D Systems was getting big and scary, the unexpected/expected happens. In an all-stock transaction, the merger of Israel-based Objet into Minnesota-based Stratasys, leaves the new entity with a $1.4 billion dollar equity value and a bigger slice of the market share.
3D Printing with Plastic? Pfft, whatever. Metal. Old hat. Bone? Get out of here! The number of materials being used and experimented on with 3D printers is getting out of hand – and actually, it’s quite remarkable.
You know what’s amazing about Crowdfunding? You’re not just buying something – you’re helping make it happen. If I had seen any of these projects on a blog or at a store I would say “Neat-o… Im glad someone made this.” And you know, I might buy it. Now I see these projects and I know…
A few low-cost 3D scanners have come out recently – ReconstructMe, Matterport and 3Dfy. These start-ups have utilized the Kinect or a Kinect-like device to make an affordable solution for modelling actual spaces and products. I was ecstatic when Microsoft released the Kinect and then the development software. It’s such a powerful hardware/software combo. It…
Great ideas don’t mean squat if you can’t market them properly. The invention of the modern automobile, developed by the dynamic duo known as Karl and Bertha Benz, is no different. Bertha had invested much of her own dowry into Karl’s workshop in 1871 – 17 years later his patented vehicle was ready for sale,…
The moment when a 3D printer and a 3D scanner are combined into a single product… hasn’t happened, yet. But, we’re pretty sure there would be some positive returns for both the manufacturer and the consumer market. A great number of people would love to replicate the cups and spoons they already have instead of…
3D printers and designers have been doing some fancy footwork recently. The Smithsonian has put out a great article covering several new designs. Here’s my favourite, by Hoon Chung for the London College of Fashion.
Music and 3D printing, two things that are very close to my heart. Sheila Munro of Dropping Form Design is now selling her 3D printed flute in “Antique Bronze Glossy” through her Shapeways shop. Called a Shakuhachi Flute, it’s beautifully embroidered and grained. From the picture, it’s tough to even tell if it was 3D…
The Economist reported in its latest issue that US-based Gene Duplication Corporation had managed to 3D print an animal. Yes. We can now print Lassie.
I came across Eva Friedrich’s work last year and thought it was really thought provoking material. I’ve always had a fascination with Voronoi diagrams (I shamelessly attached a picture of a piece I will be printing with the DShape soon – made with Voronoi diagrams.) Here’s more about what they are, where you see them…
There’s a little site called Kickstarter. It has a lot of amazing crowdfunded projects on it and, like us, you may have a mild, vein-slapping addiction to it. If so, these are two that you’ll want to check out. One has exceeded its funding by leaps and bounds. The other is just about to break…
Instructables and Objet have joined forces to give you a challenge, the “Make it Real Challenge”. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make a nice, user-friendly Instructable of how to make a virtual object a reality.
I admit it, I was completely enamoured with the Human Birdwings Video. If you haven’t seen it, this is a video of Floris Kaayk (AKA Jarno Smeets, or as I like to call him, Harvey Birdman) strapping on a convincing-looking set of wings and taking off. Turns out it was fake and proves an uncomfortable reality…
Designers of all strips and colours are producing a lot of interesting plastic-extruded work lately, especially where sound and 3D printing intersect. Here are a few things that have popped up recently worth a mention and a listen.
Note/Warning: If you are looking into the purchase of this printer, be warned. The manufacturer has not delivered. Please read the comments below the article, before making a decision to send your money to Sumpod. Fantastic technology has been cooking up on the other side of the pond. I’m talking specifically about the SUMPOD 3D…
This is what I would truly call ‘a 3D movie.’ This ‘3Drehkino’ is a series of 3D printed figures of a man walking. An LED is triggered by each passing figure in his appropriate pose, illuminating it and giving us the illusion of motion. Tobias Krawutschke designs all kinds of Zoetropes (which you can see here),…
This is our new column “Great Ideas Never Die.” Here at SolidSmack we talk a lot about the future of Design and forget the History behind the tools, the inventions and the processes we use. Not to mention the rather kooky, inventive and slightly crazy designers behind them. So we decided to give them a…