3D Printers Getting Closer To Your Doorstep

Am bringing to you this time “the-world-of-possibilities”. Look around you, what can you see? Many things that looks impossible?
The Bulb, The Television, The Computer ...
The world is at it again...
Many people still haven’t heard of this...

Imagine a future in which a device connected to a computer can print a solid object. A future in which we can have tangible goods as well as intangible services delivered to our desktops or high street shops over the Internet. And a future in which the everyday "atomization" of virtual objects into hard reality has turned the mass pre-production and stock-holding of a wide range of goods and spare parts into no more than an historical legacy.

Such a future may sound like it is being plucked from the worlds of animations such as Star Trek. However, while transporter devices that can instantaneously deliver us to remote locations may remain a fantasy, 3D printers capable of outputting physical objects have been in both development and application for over three decades, and are now starting to present a whole host of new digital manufacturing capabilities. 3D printing may therefore soon do for manufacturing what computers and the Internet have already done for the creation, processing and storage of information. Such a possibility has also started to capture mainstream media attention. The Economist, for example, has now published several articles on 3D printing, including The Printed World (February 2011), and most recently the superb 3D Printing Scales Up.
3D printing is an additive technology in which objects are built up in a great many very thin layers. The first commercial 3D printer was based on a technique called stereolithography.
Stereolithographic 3D printers (known as SLAs or stereolithography apparatus) position a perforated platform just below the surface of a vat of liquid photopolymer. The perforated platform is then lowered very slightly and another slice is traced out and hardened by the laser. Another slice is then created, and then another, until a complete object has been printed and can be removed from the vat of photopolymer, drained of excess liquid, and cured. Stereolithographic printers remain one of the most accurate types of hardware for fabricating 3D output, with a minimum build layer thickness of only 0.06mm (0.0025 of an inch).

You don’t even need to know all those grammars; all you need to know now is its getting closer to your door step.

In case you don’t know, the range of products that have employed 3D printers in their design process or to produce final moulds or mould masters is constantly growing. To date such products include automobiles, trainers, jewellery, plastic toys, coffee makers, and all sorts of plastic bottles, packaging and containers. 3D printers are now also widely used by many major hearing aid manufacturers to produce ear moulds and shells for final consumer use.

NASA has already tested a 3D printer on the International Space Station, and recently announced its requirement for a high resolution 3D printer to produce spacecraft parts during deep space missions. The US Army has also experimented with a truck-mounted 3D printer capable of outputting spare tank and other vehicle components in the battlefield.
In an age in which the news, books, music, video and even our communities are all the subjects of digital dematerialization, the development and application of 3D printing reminds us that human beings have both a physical and a psychological need to keep at least one foot in the real world. 3D printing has a bright future, not least in rapid prototyping but also in the manufacture of many kinds of plastic and metal objects, in medicine, in the arts, and in outer space. Desktop 3D printers for the home are already a reality, and should cost no more than a few hundred dollars by 2015. 3D printers capable of outputting in colour and multiple materials also exist and will continue to improve to a point where functional products will be able to be output. As devices that will provide a solid bridge between cyberspace and the physical world and as an important manifestation of the Second Digital Revolution -- 3D printing is therefore likely to play some part in all of our futures.
What do you think about this World-of-Possibilities ...