That didn’t take long. After last week’s report on La Poste, Scandinavian PostNord is getting into 3D printing as well.
PostNord, a group built from the 2009 merge of the Swedish and Danish postal services, announced a very interesting deal with Stratasys and 3YOURMIND. They provide a wide variety of communications and logistics services in the region, and now they are getting into the 3D print service business.
The action starts with the 3D Creator app, available on certain Android Xperia devices. This app uses photogrammetry to develop 3D models simply by taking images of a subject, and is quite usable by almost anyone.
The capture of a 3D model could be thrilling for users, at least for a day or two, but then what? The new deal between the parties enables those capturing 3D models with the 3D Creator app to submit it to a joint service that will 3D print, in full color, the captured 3D model.
It seems that Berlin-based 3YOURMIND will do some preparatory steps on the 3D model to ensure it is printable, and then it is sent to a Stratasys J750, a full color texture 3D printer, for production. The resulting color print is then physically sent to the requestor though PostNord’s extensive delivery services.
This is quite a powerful extension to the 3D Creator app, as it would seem anyone is capable of easily obtaining a color 3D print. Perhaps the days of the occasionally seen 3D print figurine studios are numbered?
If Stratasys can set up a deal like this in Scandinavia, there is no reason they could not do so in many other regions; there are plenty of Postal Services in this world. Perhaps they are using the PostNord venture as a kind of experiment to see if this is a feasible operation, and possibly to work out bugs before they deploy to larger markets.
If it works, Stratasys will no doubt need to make quite a few more J750s. That, I presume, is the master plan here.
If only the app and service were available on more platforms.
