Whether you're looking to print an Aston Martin or a birdhouse, Microsoft promises you'll be able to do it more easily with Windows 8.1. Redmond is looking to iron out the wrinkles currently associated with 3D printing -- like metadata loss during exporting and limited communication between apps and printers -- and make 3D printing more like 2D printing so it becomes "more seamless and ubiquitous." The software giant's plan for making it all happen? Defining a standardized feature set that represents what current and future printers can and will do, for one. Microsoft is also pushing for the use of its own 3D data format (3MF) that addresses the current's (STL) shortcomings -- most notably its lack of support for different colors and materials. October 17th probably won't be the day 3D printing explodes, but these are certainly welcome steps toward that happening. Now, if Ballmer and co. could just bring the price of the printers themselves down then we'd really be in business.
More about 3D printing and printers:
3D printing might be the wave of the future, or it might just end up a niche hobby that’s pretty cool but ultimately too expensive and complicated to ever take off. Whatever that fate may be, startup Modern Meadow is throwing its hat into the 3D printing ring, but rather than printing plastic trinkets or gun parts, it plans to print edible meat.
In order to print live cells, the engineers perform biopsies on animals and collect stem cells, or other special cells. Because stem cells are basically magical (this not a technical term), they can not only turn into other cells, but replicate themselves. Once they replicate enough times, the engineers load them into a bioprinter cartridge, which creates something of a bioink — a material made of many live cells. When the bioink is printed, the living cells link together and form living tissue.
When using 3D bioprinting a hamburger as an example, Professor Gabor Forgacs — part of the father and son founders of Modern Meadow — notes that the actual shape of the food isn’t too much of a hurdle, as it’s simply a round, relatively 2D patty. Another benefit to producing edible meat is that the live tissue can die afterward, as consumable meat normally isn’t living tissue, so a method of preserving the tissue’s life isn’t really required.
Though it might be easier to print edible, dead-tissue meat, Modern Meadow is facing a couple fairly large hurdles. For one, convincing the world to eat lab-grown meat might not be so easy. Another significant hurdle is that though Modern Meadow hasn’t grown something like a burger or steak as of yet, the price of one would be astronomically high. Another team of researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has been growing animal cells to produce strips of lean muscle, with the goal of creating an artificial hamburger. Though the team doesn’t use bioprinting, they do use a somewhat related process of having stem cells replicate and create live tissue in a mold. Unfortunately, creating an entire burger would currently cost over $300,000.
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes. 3D printing is also considered distinct from traditional machining techniques, which mostly rely on the removal of material by methods such as cutting or drilling (subtractiveprocesses).
A materials printer usually performs 3D printing processes using digital technology. The first working 3D printer was created in 1984 by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corp. Since the start of the 21st century there has been a large growth in the sales of these machines, and their price has dropped substantially.
The 3D printing technology is used for both prototyping and distributed manufacturing with applications in architecture, construction (AEC), industrial design, automotive, aerospace, military, engineering, civil engineering, dental and medical industries, biotech (human tissue replacement), fashion, footwear, jewelry, eyewear, education, geographic information systems, food, and many other fields. It has been speculated that 3D printing may become a mass market item because open source 3D printing can easily offset their capital costs by enabling consumers to avoid costs associated with purchasing common household objects
Hope People use for constructive work that would benefit us rather than destructive way to society by printing guns that can create big legal precedents.
