>I can also imagine a day where all your currently disposable plastic goods (cups, utensils, clips, etc) would be printed on demand and disposed in a hopper that would recycle them as raw material for the next round.
Is this the killer app for home 3D printing? Printing plastic spoons? The same spoons you can buy mass-produced in packs of fifty for eighty cents or something?
Its a fair question, and in truth just printing plastic utensils is not a killer app, just like calculating sums on a microcomputer made less sense than buying a calculator. Rather I expect the transition to 'user focused' 3D printing to be the point where nearly every gizmo you use around the house is printed and then recovered after use. Any container, tool, decoration, replacement part, mounting bracket, paper good, or packing material, pretty much anything that you have to go out and buy today, and have to recycle responsibly. The value proposition will be that it is exactly what you need, right now but you don't have to store it for a future need. I'm still on the fence as to whether or not it will ever be practical to 3D print clothing but given the Disney demo of soft printables I know people are thinking along those lines too.
Step past thinking that it is a spoon that you can buy a pack of 50 for (which you have to in order to keep the costs down) to thinking that in the space where you would store a pack of 50 spoons, knives, forks, plates, and napkins you can have an nearly inexhaustible supply of spoons with a birthday theme, serving, color matched to a table setting. Every time you set the table you can print it all out, from place mats to drink cups. And then throw it back to be recycled again with just the organics left over.
And to return to my previous theme, having been the first person in my family to build their own computer in 1978 and listened to everyone about how stupid and inane it was to own a useless computer, only to live my life and find them become the 'smartphones' of today. When I walked through Makerfair this year and saw all of the 3D printing stuff there and heard the same sort of dimissive comments which I had heard at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1980, it really struck me. The same feeling you get when you are halfway through a book and realize you've read the same story but set with different characters and in a different place, but fundamentally the same story.
> Rather I expect the transition to 'user focused' 3D printing to be the point where nearly every gizmo you use around the house is printed and then recovered after use. Any container, tool, decoration, replacement part, mounting bracket, paper good, or packing material, pretty much anything that you have to go out and buy today, and have to recycle responsibly.
The cool thing about this, especially if you can recycle, is that you can say "Well, I don't need x, y, and z -- I'll just toss them in the melter" the same way someone says "man, I have a lot of plastic spoons and old hangers, I'll toss them in the trash."
But then you can turn around and say "Oh yeah, the doohickey on my closet door is broken, I'll just print another one."
That is coming too but on the industrial scale. You can print in metal at Shapeways now, but owning a laser metal sintering machine is not going to be practical unless you can grind up previous things to make new things. There are already at least two filament creator projects out there that make a credible replacement filament out of scrap plastic.
...the same spoons you can buy for 80c... if you live next to Walmart.
The killer app for 3D printers would be to supply whatever it is you want whenever you want it - even if you live in Arrowtown NZ (lucky me!).
I see a massive battle coming between Amazon's logistics on one hand, and the effectiveness of 3D printers on the other. 3D printers' limitations (plastic-only, no colour, slow) mean Amazon is safe for now, but once I can print my measuring spoons faster and cheaper than Amazon can ship them, that's a killer app.
"...the same spoons you can buy for 80c... if you live next to Walmart."
So, Walmart is the only world provider of 80c plastic spoons ?
Let´s be serious, unless you live in the middle of a jungle or a desert (in which case you´ll probably value more a reusable metal spoon over a 3D-printed one), you´ll rarely be less that 30min drive from a supermarket or convenience store (to which you´ll need to go anyway to buy some definitely non-3d-printable-yet food) that will probably have what you are looking for.
Even if your reasoning is sound, I believe your situation it's kind of an exception, most people live "next to Walmart", so it´s hard to think about it as a killer application.
This technology makes living far away from Walmart a much more palatable experience. Combined with self-sustaining energy sources like solar panels, it could be the basis for a different urban configuration that doesn't depend on direct access to centralized distribution networks.
In the medium term I can see "high-tech hippie" communes of young educated hipsters moving to the outskirts of cities, living in plastic domes, telecommuting, composting their waste and 3D printing parts for their maker-culture activities. If this catches on, this could be the basis for less dense cities.
> Is this the killer app for home 3D printing? Printing plastic spoons? The same spoons you can buy mass-produced in packs of fifty for eighty cents or something?
Sunday afternoon: I am tidying up the house. I could use six or so small boxes to store neatly some loose parts. I would have printed those boxes if I had a 3D printer.
Sunday afternoon: I need to print my flight ticket. I could wait tomorrow morning, go in a copy shop and print it. 4 cents. I will print it right now with my inkjet printer and forget about it.
My nephews are visiting me and one of them likes my keychain. I would print a copy for him if I had a 3D printer.
My nephews are visiting me and one of them likes one of my photos that hang in the dining room. I could wait until tomorrow, go to the photo shop and print one for him. 1 euro. I will print it right now with my inkjet printer and git it to him right away.
I think "I can print it right away" is a killer app on its own.
Nope. So what, his point about being a revolutionary tech still stands. If you ask me I thing the groundbreaking app will be the "repair app", basically you take a couple of pictures of a broken object, you give some input about the damage and it shows you a 3d piece to print and use as a fix (plug and stick fix) specially for solid things such as: broken chairs, broken doors, broken floor tiles and such.
I'd love that. Just finding the correct replacement knob, switch, harness, etc. drives me nuts. IIRC, antique car enthusiast Jay Leno just recreates the parts he needs.
I think a killer app for 3d printers is completely unified design for small-medium businesses. Sorta like how Disneyland has mouse ears on everything.
The real money will be made, just like with minicomputers, in the software. Desktop publishing had themes, future software will make it easy to make stuff that looks like, lego or erector set or trees or whatever. High detail procedurally generated themes to surface whatever objects people are producing.
I wanted to introduce Sprirographs to some kids, and the only spirograph sets I could find here after a whole day of searching (local malls + online stores) were very simple ones; circular with pin-point holes.
If I could recycle old plastic waste to print interesting spirograph stencils, I would be very very happy.
Is this the killer app for home 3D printing? Printing plastic spoons? The same spoons you can buy mass-produced in packs of fifty for eighty cents or something?