I love 3D printing, so my first thought was: how cool.

But there’s something very odd about this. They’re going from the computer model to a 3D printout to create a video frame that’s stored on a computer. That sounds to me like a very painful way to do computer-generated graphics. Something like carving your email on a tree trunk and flinging it at your friend. Or scratching a note on the back of your cell phone and gluing it to a postcard.

I know that photography of real scenery lit by honest-to-goodness light has a special richness that movie makers crave. And stop-motion animators are an obsessive bunch. But it’s so expensive and loopy compared to the computer graphics it resembles that I have to think this genre is a dying breed.

We will print toasters. We will print golf carts. We will print small children.

But for now, we are printing toys and shoes. Fast Company magazine has a good story this month on (among other high tech sports gear) Nike’s fancy “Flywire” shoes for the Olympics. They’ve been able to innovate rapidly by basing their super lightweight shoe design on… bridges. Here’s the story.

The inspiration for the new construction came from the cables on a suspension bridge. Rather than cords of steel, Flywire uses thin, strong-as-steel threads of Vectran, placed in fan-shaped clusters of between 10 and 20 strands, each about 3 inches in length. [...] Flywire lead designer Jay Meschter’s stroke of genius was to stop thinking of a shoe as something assembled and start thinking of it as something that is, well, printed. When Meschter connected the two ideas of filaments and strength, his mind leaped to embroidery machines, which, he realized, print out lines and shapes using colored thread stitches rather than ink. If Meschter could stitch in 3-D form the cabling that holds up a suspension bridge, and anchor the ultrathin “cables” around a foot shape, he’d be able to create an ultralight shoe in the same time it took to stitch somebody’s name on a shirt.

Printing shoes has two virtues: it’s cheap and it’s fast. A fast, cheap product design cycle means that innovation can happen extremely fast, and the fruits of innovation can be passed on to the consumer rapidly. I find this story exciting not because I want to go buy some Flywire shoes but because this is one part of an accelerating trend. Printing makes design happen faster, and when design happens faster things get better.

Of course not everybody gets excited by molecules. But other markets are opening up. Let’s suppose you’re really into World of Warcraft. For 20 hours or more every week, you are Sturmdrang the Pitiless. Now you can get a 3-D print of your online character from FigurePrints.com. That has to be a deep market. It’s brilliant!

And if Warcraft isn’t your thing, now you can get a nice 3-D topographical map of your favorite terrain from LandPrint, as described here: LandPrint.com Creates New Market for 3D Printing with 3D Physical Landscapes. I might have to get one of those. I’ve been thinking about a nice relief model of western Kansas.

This is a good example of the future that is here but not yet widespread. At 12,500 euros, you might not jump at the chance to buy yourself a Trabecula Table. But other products, cheaper products, like this will follow soon enough.

It sounds like some kind of Forbidden Planet science fiction, but there are still some significant limitations. For instance, you print using a single material (typically plastic or metal), so there’s no possibility of xeroxing your iPod. And whatever you print can be no larger than the print volume of the machine, which rules out printing yourself a new house. And until recently, the price was prohibitive. At just less than $40,000, ZCorp’s ZPrinter 450 was a relatively cheap new entrant. Nifty, but not the kind of thing to drop your spare change on.

But now along comes the Desktop Factory. They claim to be able to sell you a 3-D printer for $5000. That’s not lunch money, but it’s astonishingly cheap. The quality is predictably low, but it’s amazing the thing works at all at that price point. This is the laser printer of our age. What happens when it becomes easy and cheap to print novel 3-D objects?

Good stuff. I bet.

A process that works with airplanes ought to work with buildings too, and so it does. The big difference is that the construction industry moves much more slowly than the aerospace industry. There’s less pressure to go high tech. But once contractors get used to working with CAD systems, the payoff will be huge. Here’s an article from Computerworld about this phenomenon: GM builds on 3-D model. The author follows the story of a factory that General Motors built, and it’s very much like the Boeing story above. Instead of printing out thousands of 2-D blueprints, they worked straight from the computer model. The computer tells you when two pipes are colliding. As a result, they were able to eliminate the costly delays that are endemic to the culture of construction.

Because collisions in 2-D projects are unavoidable, tradespeople try to get their work done first, Lemley says. When a collision occurs, everything stops while the drawings are reviewed. “You go through hundreds of drawings, and you call the architect, and they have to come down and bring a mechanical [drawing] down,” he says. That puts everyone else behind and results in expensive change orders. Building to the model eliminated the problem.

The GM project came in 5% under budget and 25% ahead of schedule. That adds up to real money on a $1.5 billion factory.

A process that works on big buildings ought to work on small ones too, and so it does. In the latest issue of Metropolis, I came across this article on bolt-together pre-fab housing: Bursting Out. Pre-fab housing conjures up images of shoddy workmanship, cheap materials, and bad taste. But in the future it will mean customized pre-cut panels delivered in an Ikea-like flat pack and quickly assembled on site. From the article:

The process borrowed heavily from industrial-design mass manufacturing. After hollowing out the solid model and developing a structural diagram based on the ribs, the architects ran commands to unfold the computer model, break up the surfaces into production-size triangles, label each piece and rib, and then organize them onto sheets for the laser cutter. This information was then run through String IT, a program used in furniture design, which “nests” it—calculating an optimum layout of the various shapes on the given dimensions of the plywood sheets to minimize waste—reducing the amount of plywood required by about 20 percent. At the laser cutter this file was run to produce 1,100 nonidentical plywood pieces, each cut, drilled, and etched to determine its location in the house. In January 2005 these arrived flat-packed in North Haven, where a team of 12 students from the architecture program at nearby Newcastle University was prepped for a fast-build process that the architects likened to a barn raising.

This technique is already proving useful in places, like post-Katrina New Orleans, where old-school house construction is too expensive and slow, too medieval to serve the needs of the community.

The first fruits of modeling are in narrow and specialized domains, but the real value comes when you start to integrate the efforts of multiple teams across multiple domains. It takes a long time to get everybody in the game, but the results can be stunning.

UAVs have shown great promise, the most important of which is that they can complete a mission and never ever require you to send in a rescue team to recover a downed pilot. But they suffer from some shortcomings. First of all, the generals who buy them were all combat pilots, and they don’t much like turning pilots into videogame players. Also, they currently require too much manpower to operate. But this is beginning to change, and given the capabilities of current hardware and software these days, I’m sure it will change quickly.

One indication of this change is the Polecat project recently unveiled by Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works. Polecat shows great promise by simultaneously attacking the two great problems of any new airplane: the cost of building it, and the cost of operating it. Operationally the plane will feature advanced software that more or less allows you to tell it where to go without having to pay a fancy-pants pilot to step away from the craps table. Eventually these robot planes will unionize and drive up the operational costs again, but until then, we’ll be able to fly them damn cheap (relatively speaking).

Nicer than this is the fact that this plane was designed and built from scratch in 18 months. If we are to believe this, then aviation is entering a new golden age. Typical manned aircraft these days take a good fraction of a decade to develop. I was trained as an aeronautical engineer, and this one fact more than any other made me get out of the business. Throw the man out of the plane, and everything can happen faster. Beyond not needing seats and cup-holders, Polecat was built quickly because it was literally printed out by special 3-d rapid prototyping machines. In other words, the engineer who designed the wing could, after signing off on it, simply click a button that says “Make this now.” This is where the future is headed. Initially only R&D vehicles will be built like this. Eventually, though, your own customized car will be printed at a massive car printing facility near your home. You’ll be able to pick it up the day after you order it. Assuming the robot driver lets you get in.

I was showing off my Soliton sculpture at work, and someone pointed me to another artist doing similar work, Helaman Ferguson. Grossman also has some excellent links to both technical resources and other mathematical sculptors on this page.