Friday, August 1, 2014

3D Gets Real?


Amazon has opened a store front for 3D objects.  I'm sure that this is just an experiment on Amazon's part, but it appears to be a legitimate attempt to understand (and profit from) interest in items created on-demand from 3D printers.  This could be a game changer for retail for certain types of objects.

You can see from the above picture, they are focusing on relatively non-important items.  That said, this could be a good start for a more wide-ranging retail catalogue.  One could imagine a point in the future at which you could choose between waiting 2 weeks for a part to be made using traditional means or paying somewhat more for a 3D printed version of the part.  IMHO, this gets way more interesting when you are able to move to mixed materials (not just plastic, but plastic, metal and potentially wood).  You are not going to 3D print wood, so perhaps there is some CNC milling that could go along with this and then some simple assembly (even done by robots).

As my middle child always says, "The future is going to be awesome!"

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