Fabbing: For the masses or the elite?

[andygates]

3D printing - fabrication or fabbing - is a funny thing.  You start with a digital file and a make-anything 3D printer machine.  The printer chugs away and makes whatever you've given it, from shot glasses to Second Life characters, through to the Danté-esque Fall of the Damned on the right, lamp depicting writhing, interwtined bodies.

The lamp is a limited run of forty pieces at a super-premium $45,000 price.  But there's absolutely no reason for that.  Digital file, makey-machine.  This is only limited because someone has chosen it to be limited.

Fabbing has the potential to be a truly disruptive technology: think of the Feed in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age - a consumer-level technology that lets the average person work a consumer-level interface to get shoes or a burrito.  Closer to reality is the RepRap project, home 3D-printing open-source enthusiasts who are trying to make printers which can print their own parts.  Now that truly would be a disruptive technology.

So, if anyone wants to upload Fall of the Damned to BitTorrent, let's get the revolution started.