This Is The World’s First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun (Photos) - Forbes

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

[…]

Of course, Defcad’s users may not adhere to so many rules. Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.

Source: forbes.com

5 May 311 Permalink

What 3-D Printing Means To The Future Of Advertising | Co.Create: Creativity \ Culture \ Commerce

Advertisers will be forced to reconcile their physical outputs in the world in a way that spitting out spots and microsites never faced us with. Or, said differently, our ad crap is made more evident when it’s a real piece of crap sitting on a desk or floor. We’ll have to continue to ask ourselve, “Is this additive value or just some more crap?” And the crap factor will, hopefully, make us work harder to do better for audiences who are increasingly immune to our virtual ad crap, more so when it’s physical ad crap.

We as consumers will likely find ourselves in a world where, in addition to all the images and messages we are bombarded with today, almost every physical object in public places are designed by somebody in order to make us feel, react, think and ultimately consume in a certain way. A likely reaction against this will be that we will not just close our ears with headphones, but also our eyes to shield our fragile and adaptive minds against all these intrusions.

Source: fastcocreate.com

3 May 54 Permalink

3ders.org - Dutch architect to build “endless” house with 3D printer | 3D Printer News & 3D Printing News

Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (39) from Universe Architecture in Amsterdam designed a one-piece building which will be built on a 3D printer. He hopes the so-called Landscape House can be printed out latest in year 2014.

This is another 3D project that suggests that this technology is not about just spare parts and tools, but that even architecture and construction will be in for a quantum leap.

Source: 3ders.org

20 January 215 Permalink

futurist-foresight:

What a great addition to any 3D printing operating  - a tool to prepare your own plastic for printing.

berlinfarmlab:

American college student Tyler McNaney has invented a desktop machine that makes the raw materials for 3D printing by grinding up waste plastic from bottles, wrappers and even Lego bricks.

link

This is a crucial step to be able to create 3d printing raw material from things in your surrounding.

Source: berlinfarmlab

18 January 114 futurist-foresight Permalink

The Most Mind-Blowing 3-D Printed Objects Of 2012 | Popular Science

Source: popsci.com

2 January 11 Permalink

emergentfutures:

Craig Venter Imagines a World with Printable Life Forms

Craig Venter imagines a future where you can download software, print a vaccine, inject it, and presto! Contagion averted.

“It’s a 3-D printer for DNA, a 3-D printer for life,” Venter said here today at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York City.

The geneticist and his team of scientists are already testing out a version of his digital biological converter, or “teleporter.”

Full Story: Wired

21 October 46 emergentfutures Permalink

U.S. Army Embraces 3D Printers: “It’s Kind of a Magical Thing”
singularityhub.com

“The fact that we could do this many designs and print them out and have them in their hands in one week gave them the option to choose between what works best for their application,” Moore said. “This is a good example of how we use the technology every day.

ABERDEEN PROV­ING GROUND, Md. (Oct. 3, 2012) — When…

19 October 3 Permalink

The Radicalness Of 3D Printing

In other words, it won’t make sense any more to pay Chinese factory workers to make 100 million duplicates of the same product. Better to pay American designers to make 10,000 different products specially tailored to individual customers — in the exact size and style they want to buy. Products they can receive in the mail, or print out at Home Depot, FedEx Office, Wal-Mart, or whichever retailers are smart enough to embrace this technology first.

Source: ieet.org

8 October 108 Permalink

There Is No Reason For Any Individual To Have A 3D Printer In Their Home | TechCrunch

Oh, I agree that 3D printing will be a serious threat to manufacturing as we know it. But not at home. That doesn’t make sense. Instead, we’ll have two kinds of communal 3D printer shops.

In high-infrastructure areas, there’ll be a clutch of online providers a la Stratasys (and I expect one of them to be Amazon.com): you’ll pick your 3D design from a huge online menu, send them size information and maybe a few photos from some kind of cunningly designed app, tweak the 3D preview until you’re happy, and they’ll print it out in some vast warehouse full of high-end high-speed 3D printers and ship it to you, possibly that same day.

In low-infrastructure areas, or if you’re a casual hobbyist, or if you have very specific requirements, you’ll head down the road to your nearest local printing facility. Depending on where you are, maybe this is tomorrow’s TechShop, maybe it’s a cluster of converted shipping containers on the outskirts of Uganda each with their own specialties and strengths. They’ll customize your order, render it in the cloud as needed, print it out, and tweak and iterate until it’s done. More expensive but more specific.

Source: TechCrunch

7 October 47 Permalink