[MUSIC PLAYING]
CARINE CARMY: 3D printing is a technology
that lets you take a digital file
and turn it into a physical product.
SAM CERVANTES: Almost anything you can imagine,
people are creating.
I think it's going to open up whole new opportunities
in areas of mass customization.
MICHAEL WEINBERG: Unlike with music or movies, with the 3D
printer, a lot of things that are printed
aren't protected by copyright.
JOSEPH FLAHERTY: One of the really cool things
about 3D printing is it really changes the dynamic
of a consumer culture.
It turns you from being a passive consumer
to an active creator.
SAM CERVANTES: 3D printing is this amazing new technology
where you can take a 3D digital file
and with the click of a button, use that file to create
an actual physical 3D part.
So how does a 3D printer work?
The first step is to get a 3D file.
And you can get your 3D file in one of two ways.
One, you can simply download the file from the internet.
The second way is you can design your own 3D part.
The software is going to slice your part up into layers.
By building a part layer by layer,
you're able to create a plastic part in three dimensions
and the possibilities are limited only
by your imagination.
People will create their next big invention or engineers
and designers create small production
runs or little prototypes.
Teachers can use it to print out teaching aids.
If a teacher is doing a little lesson on a ship,
they can actually print out a sailing ship
and pass it around the class.
And people print out things for around the house.
iPhone cases are pretty big.
You break a towel hook, you can print out a new one.
We want to make 3D printers at a price
that the average person can afford and also easy to use.
We're already seeing late-stage early adoption of 3D printing.
But for me, the exciting thing is what's to come.
CARINE CARMY: Shapeways is an online 3D printing
community and marketplace.
Anyone in the world can upload their 3D model
and we'll print for you.
And then also, if you decide you want to make it for sale,
you can sell it and we'll produce it
on demand for that customer wherever they are in the world.
You can essentially bring a product to market with no risk.
You don't have inventory anymore.
You don't have to make sure that there's
a market ready for your product.
If you sell one, that's awesome.
If you sell 10,000, then all of a sudden,
you have a passive income model and that
radically changes the economy.
Usually, to bring a product to market takes a year.
And then, you have to find the manufacturer and the investor.
And so it's going to force us to change
the way we think about not only buying products,
but how they're made.
One of our colleagues broke his stroller
and it would have cost him something like $250
to get that part in the mail from the stroller company.
And he literally just 3D-printed a stroller part
and got it for $20.
You have this explosive technology where everything
is made just for you, but at the price and quality of something
you'd buy in a store.
This could be a scary technology for some companies,
because what does that mean for seasons now?
You have infinite inventory and what
does that mean for scarcity, which
is one of the core tenets of so many industries?
I think it's very similar, though, to social media
or other tools of engagement, where
you're afraid to see what that would mean to let consumers
co-create with you or to really rethink
your traditional manufacturing process,
because you have so many middlemen.
I think we just have to stop thinking
that you need to reach 100,000, a million people for something
to be successful.
Customization, it's really changing the way
that we have to think about design and production, as well.
MICHAEL WEINBERG: People who make money
by selling things that are all of a sudden easily copied
with a 3D printer are going to be worried
that people are going to be making unauthorized copies
with those 3D printers.
And I think one of the challenges
for them is going to be, well, how do I react?
Objects that are artistic objects, that
are objects that you would hire an artist to make,
those things are all going to be protected by copyright.
But those objects that actually do
things, that have a use besides just sort of entertaining
or looking nice, a lot of those are
going to fall outside the scope of copyright.
They might be protected by patent, but a lot of them
won't be protected by any sort of intellectual property
at all.
And as a result of that, you can use them or improve upon them
or build on them as much as you want and no one can stop you.
3D printing right now is at its very beginnings
and so you don't have a lot of case law about everyday people
making exact copies of physical objects,
and certainly not a lot of case law
about people being able to do that on a large scale.
The good thing, hopefully, is that the industries that
are disrupted by 3D printing have the model of the music
industry to maybe learn from.
The music industry, when someone started copying things,
decided the best thing to do was take their time and their money
and invest it in suing everyone they could find and try
and stop the progress of technology.
That didn't work very well.
And so the hope is that these creators, when
they see these new technologies, they capture some of the upside
and they say, oh, wait, this can change my business
for the better and they do that.
It's a hard thing to do, but the music industry
has taught us that it may be the thing they have to do.
JOSEPH FLAHERTY: 3D printing's going
to have a profound impact on all of us,
whether you consider yourself a designer or not.
In the future, there are going to be 3D printers that
will allow you to actually create
three-dimensional structures out of living cells.
And they can build very complex structures,
like blood vessels or skin tissue.
And the idea there is that in 10 or 20 years,
these scientists are going to be able to 3D-print tissue that
could replace damaged vessels of the heart
or they might be able to print replacement organs.
So you won't have to go to find an organ donor anymore.
You'll just be able to have one 3D-printed at the hospital
based on your own cell and your own genetic makeup.
Right now at MIT, scientists are working
on 3D printers that would actually
allow you to print food.
And who wouldn't want that in their house, right?
If you could just ask Siri to cook you a steak,
I mean, it's really going to be an exciting time in the home.
In Japan, there's a company that's taking sonogram data.
So they scan a pregnant woman's belly
and they're able to actually 3D-print a figure of her torso.
So instead of just having a fuzzy little black
and white picture, you're getting
a real model of what your child is going to look like.
People are using 3D printers to do
all sorts of interesting things in terms of the environment.
Researchers are using 3D printers
that can print concrete to make replacements
for parts of the Great Barrier Reef that have been damaged.
Normally, those reefs take thousands of years to build.
But what these scientists do is they find the areas that
are damaged, they make CAD replicas
of those damaged areas, and they print them in concrete.
So it's a base structure upon which
coral can create a top layer.
And that helps reinvigorate the environment.
It helps return normality to that area.
And one of the coolest things about 3D printing
is that it's a community that never stops innovating.
There are hundreds of innovators who
are making little tweaks to these products, who are
trying out different things.
And so it really gives everybody an opportunity
to create anything they could imagine.
[WHIRRING]
CARINE CARMY: 3D printing is a next wave
of how brands and consumers can engage.
And now, we're just starting to see that happen.
JOSEPH FLAHERTY: In a few years' time,
they're going to be no more difficult to use
or difficult to understand than a camera phone.
MICHAEL WEINBERG: The way to protect creators and designers
is to make sure to give people a way to spend money
on 3D-printed things.
SAM CERVANTES: In the future, we're
going to see a lot more people unleashing
their pent-up creativity and that's
what's most exciting for me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]