A routine press release from Ultimaker with some new product videos got us thinking hard about what’s been happening over the past few years.
Ultimaker is one of the leading manufacturers of personal 3D printers today and as such they have a competent marketing department that reaches out to the media to promote their products. Today we received a notice of new videos on their three key products, the Ultimaker 2, Ultimaker 2 Go and the Ultimaker 2 Extended, which we’ve covered previously.
There’s nothing particularly new about the machines, as they haven’t changed since their announcement earlier this year. They’re definitely fine machines, but what was far more intriguing to us was the three videos, which we include here:
The videos show people using Ultimakers in various home, school and business situations, either in a workshop or on the go. That’s all possible, although the usage shown might be slightly exaggerated over reality in general, but that reality is likely true in many cases today.
That’s what we noticed: people simply using 3D printers in their life in ways that make sense.
Now consider this: the technology of personal 3D printing was, until only a couple of years ago, a near fantasy. There were small groups of nerdy inventors and academic researchers in a few distant labs and workshops fiddling with awkward-looking parts in the initial attempts to create a desktop replication device. Certainly these pioneers imagined a world where 3D printing became commonplace.
One of those small groups were what would eventually become Ultimaker.
From those very modest beginnings, we now see videos of everyday people using replication technology. It’s a grand leap from the very early DIY days, but it’s here. Now.
We live in that 3D printed world dreamt by the pioneers. If we had a time machine and could somehow show these videos to the inventors of 2007, they would be astonished, as we all should be.
The future, however, does not stop. Prepare for additional astonishment.
