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Thursday
Dec082011
The Cambrian Explosion of 3D Printers
;)
Another new and innovative 3D printer kit available on KickStarter. Venture funding starts up another 3D printer factory. And then we read Rachel Park's blog post. She reported on her experience at Euromold, where even more low-cost personal 3D printers emerged. That got us thinking about explosions. Cambrian explosions. But, you ask, what is/was a Cambrian explosion? Some 530 million years ago, give or take, something amazing happened on our planet: The Cambrian Explosion. It was an era where multicellular life truly expanded into an incredible variety of shapes and forms. Fossils from this era are very peculiar, with invariably bizarre body plans that often provoke a "what the heck were they thinking?" reaction.
What was happening back then? Evolution took its course, as many approaches to multi-cellular life were attempted and only the best designs survived. From this era we gained such design features as body symmetry, four (or six or eight, etc.) main appendages, head on top, and so on.
The same thing happens in a new technology, when many different approaches are attempted, but only the most useful and effective survive. Well, sometimes "most funded" also applies here, but you get the idea.
This week saw the introduction of quite a few personal 3D printers. Each has a uniqueness believed to be the key feature to win over the market. Who will win? We'll only know after evolution takes its course.
It's life all over again.
tagged 
prediction in ideas
prediction in ideas 
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Reader Comments (2)
Closer to home, this feels just like the excitement and enthusiasm of the personal computer field in the early 1980s. The component parts had become cheap enough that real leaps forward in processors, memory, and operating systems were arriving almost every month. Just look how much that changed our world.
Back then, we had to read magazines to stay current. Now all the news, and all the software updates, arrives in our inbox or feed aggregator before we get up in the morning.
It's a great time to be an artist-experimenter. I'm printing the third member of my Dalek Army of World Domination as I type.
Yes, it's amazing how many new printers are coming out all the time... I'll be interested to see when / where the shakeout happens. Probably not for a while. Anyway, I wrote a similar article with my thoughts on what will happen here: http://justindunham.net/2011/08/where-is-open-source-3d-printing-going/. Thanks!