Coda: Tomorrow's Tail

For around $30,000, you can now buy a machine called a Solidscape T66 3D printer for your home.

It’s a beautiful piece of desktop engineering, although still a bit expensive. But the price is falling fast, and it’s the sort of radical technology that can set the imagination soaring. Remember the LEGO Factory story, in which you could design models, upload them, and have the kits delivered a week or two later? Well, you can now take out the waiting for delivery part.

A 3D printer is a domestic factory, capable of manufacturing almost anything in lot sizes of one. Someday, they may be as common as inkjets and not much more expensive. Just think what that might enable.

Today’s 3D printers come in various types, but a common one uses a laser to turn a bath of liquid polymer or powder into hard plastic in any shape you desire.

Feed it a 3-D object file, such as the output of a CAD program or even the screen-captured polygon file of a character from a video game, and the laser will get to work tracing it out. Layer by layer, a perfect plastic reproduction of the object emerges out of the bath.

It’s like magic.

The Solidscape 3D printer can turn bits into atoms in your own home. It’s the ultimate manufacturing technology for the Long Tail of things.

As 3D printing technology extends beyond brittle plastic to a range of materials, from metals to synthetic fabrics, we may be able to self-manufacture spare parts, toys, perhaps even entire machines that we’ve downloaded from some virtual retailer.

We already have that power for digital goods: Today you can choose to have Amazon ship you tax software in a box in ten days or simply download it and run it right now.

Other services offer you the same choice for music: a CD next week or the digital tracks now. But someday that may also extend to physical goods.

Today you print your own photographs at home; tomorrow you may print the frame, too.