A new online service allows you to e-mail your digital design and receive a rendering--such as this figurine--made in a 3-D printer that sprays successive layers of polymers. The service’s software can tweak designs to make the object printable:
http://www.shapeways.com/
Currently, such 3-D printers--in which successive layers of different polymers are sprayed gradually, building up a 3-D object--are very expensive, says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, a spinout from Philips Research, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.But the new service makes this technology accessible to anyone: budding artists, architects, product designers, and general hobbyists. A small design company might want to make samples to show a client, or an artist might want to make copies of the same sculpture created digitally, for example.
The AA Digital Prototyping Lab is a facility set up in the summer of 2007, containing various prototyping machines and a teaching space designed to evolve with the latest developments in digital fabrication technologies. The lab intends to raise awareness of the potential of digital fabrication not only as a technique to produce final proposals but also as a design tool.
No comments:
Post a Comment