Are 3D Printers The New VR?

it and think what an expensive paperweight. I was going to make the exact same joke. Where is it now? It's around the corner somewhere, isn't it if Yeah, it's near the conference rooms. Yeah, it's over by where our our our dear friend and co worker Robert Lamb hides out from the rest of us, and he's in the office. Does he actually hide over there? Is that where he is? Huh? That's his spy cave, thybe, I shouldn't have revealed. Just move his desk over there. I mean, he's got a

lot of stuff. So okay, alright, So so we've got the the forbidden zone in which Robert Lamb and the three D printer have some sort of uneasy truce. Well, I just wanted to highlight the fact that when we very first got our our three D printer, um that

was it was. It was through some work relationships. Uh, and we we don't want to come off as ungrateful like that was a cool thing, but at the very first we were we were trying to figure out, Okay, let's figure out how to use this thing, you know, yeah, three D printer, Gonna do some stuff with it. And

I was doing a lot of stuff with it. I installed software on my computer and I was making you know, designs and what is he you know, CAD design, the computer assisted design, and and it was fun for a while until man, it was just really really hard to

get that thing to work. It was a lot of work to use the three D printer, I mean it and like most jobs, failed at some point along the line, failed really spectacularly, and like the machine or the software didn't have any way of knowing when it had failed, so it would just continue to fail more and more hilariously until you had something like John Carpenter's the Thing

in place of whatever it was trying to plastic hairball. Yeah, well and I mean and and the reason for this is that it was it was a relatively inexpensive unit that was meant for home hobbyists. And yeah it wasn't. So it wasn't. I mean, so you know, like like the all of the parts were not like like finely tuned for the best possible use. And their software was all software that you had to go find. It didn't necessarily come with the machine. Well, one piece of software

came with it, others did not. And also just the fact that different factors can change the the the elements of the plastic that you're using. Right, So for example, if you've got a lot more humidity or the temperature is different in the place where you are producing things, it may mean that you have to make some adjustments to Like the way a three D printer typically works.

The basic three D printers is it lays down a thin layer of plastic on a heated um platform, and the platform is heated in order to make sure that the plastic doesn't doesn't cool too quickly, stays tacky enough to accept another layer of plastic on top of it, right, And you do layer by layer by layer until the

object you want to create has been made. And if you're talking about larger three D printers, they might even have a heated chamber in order to keep a an object from collapsing in on itself, for um, making sure it maintains its structural integrity as you go through the print job. But there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I mean, if the plastic is not extruding at the proper rate, that's a problem. If the print head drags across any layer of plastic, it could

completely dislodge it. Yeah, yeah, if any part yeah right right, if it if it scratches it in any way and creates an uneven surface for printing. Yeah, yeah, because it's just following directions, like, it's following a series of movements that it thinks it needs to do to complete a print job. Three D printers are not aware, generally speaking, of how a print job is going, so if something does go wrong, it just keeps on going wronger um.

And then can be very funny. It could be funny, but it can also be very frustrating if you're trying to print something for a specific purpose. Yeah, so today, if you can't tell already, we're going to be doing a three D printing update. We've done episodes on three D printing before. We did one in October three D Printing in Medicine, and one in August the Art of

three D Printing. I think it was all about art, wasn't Yeah, that was about replicating works of art and also creating new works of art with three D printing. We did one about three D printing in construction, I believe, yeah, in May, often called print Your Dream Home. And then our fourth ever episode that we ever did was called three D Printer Jam When tables are intellectual property? Um. Yeah, that's from March, and those those are the episodes we've

done that are entirely about three D printing. Of course, we've mentioned it like a lot of times if you listen to the podcast, um as an element of technology that researchers have been using and creating whatever it is that they're creating exactly. And so today we're really focusing primarily on consumer three D printers, stuff that would be in private hands maybe for some small businesses, but additive manufacturing is clearly very important in lots of in industries.

It's used in R and D and production on a professional level more than ever before. Like it's three D printing is enormous in various industries. It's great for prototyping. In fact, that's the primary use for three D printers today. Or yes, yeah, that that is on the cusp of changing, but it is. It has for the longest time been the main use for any three D printer. The idea was that you would come up with a design for

a product, maybe a change in a product line. You could then use a three D printer to build a model of it and see if it would actually work in the real world, because sometimes a design that works on paper is not practical, and you could do it quickly, so if it didn't work, you go back to the drawing board, makes some changes, print those out and try that. And it speeds up the prototyping process by several factors. And also because it's additive rather than subtractive, it's less

wasteful than other method. It's a prototyping so we've talked all about that extensively. And of course, though I wonder if the wastefulness thing will will be challenged by the fact that you have to create like four failed attempts at something before it actually takes. I think it depends upon the printer. To some printers maybe uh less prone

to print failures than others. Oh, I know that. I just mean, if you've got one of these that I still think it's probably faster than than like carving away at some material so that you finally get it whatever it is you were you were aiming for, depending upon the how you're carving. I mean, if you have a robot arm doing it. Maybe. Yeah. I was about to say,

like I am not personally a master whittler. No, I I've been known to whittle, but I mostly little toothpicks, depending I'm aiming for, like a spoon, but it never I never get there, so toothpick it is. I figure, you know, you just say, whatever you end up with, that's what you were uting for, and then it's a success every time. Um. But we were also seeing the potential for using three D printers in areas like in

space exploration. There have been a lot of recent experiments NASA has done several about how how can we do three D printing in a micro gravity environment where including three D printing of food yep, yep so, and that introduces challenges that you know you're on Earth, we just don't think about because we can rely on gravity to be a component of a three D printer and hold stuff in place. But up in space that's not necessarily

a luxury that you have at your disposal. UM. But on that consumer side, we really want to look at what's going on, because when we started this podcast a few years ago, uh, three D printing was one of those buzz words that was really really starting to hit UM full speed, because I can tell you the first year I went to CE which was two thousand and eight, was the first time I had ever seen a three D printer in person. I saw a maker bought three

D printer. UH. My UM co host of Tech Stuff at the time, Chris Pallette was with me, and he flipped out when he saw it. He knew immediately what it was he was looking at, whereas I did not. I had never encountered the three D printer before, and when I found out, I was like, Wow, that's a

really cool idea. And obviously those had been used in various industrial purposes for a while, but it had really just started to dawn in the consumer realm, right It just started to show up By two thousand thirteen, when we were really getting started with this show, uh, that it had gone beyond just hobbyists, like a very small group of hobbyists who were aware of it, and it

entered into the general public consciousness. And that's really when things took off, and we wanted to kind of take bearings of where we are now based upon are compared to where we were then, right, And it's it's not it's not like the graph just goes up and up

and up into the right. No, I mean I remember what things were like back when we started this show in Yeah, So essentially, I guess the question I want to ask today is is three D printing another example of a bursting or recently burst tech enthusiasm bubble, kind of like you you might think of virtual reality in the nineties, not where the technology is you know, never going anywhere, but at least for a while, it has seriously squandered its public interest capital, right, because back in

two thousand thirteen, the narrative that was being shared was that three D printers were going to be ubiquitous. Yeah, everyone's going to have one and one in every home. He's going to change the world. Yeah, you could print anything you needed. If your chair broke, you could print a replacement or the part that broke. If you needed to end up printing out utensils, you could do that. Like you've got more people over than you have plates,

for no problem, print a few plates. I think it was it was seen as a form of democratization and decentralization in a way, doing for physical objects what the Internet does for information. Right, And so there there's one question that we have in here. We were asking did it did it really have that fund that huge of an impact on people? And I would argue that in general, no,

it has not. That's not to say that there aren't specific cases where it did have an enormous impact, there are, sure, But the kind of the kind of fear that was being expressed that was like, well, I'm I'm a I'm a furniture designer, and will anyone ever buy my art again, my my my artistic beautiful items again if they can just print them at home, which everyone will be able to do really soon, right, that the fear that businesses like Ikea would disappear because anyone could just go take

some photos of Ikea furniture, go home, and three D model them and then print them up in a day's time and then you've got your own, you know, shelf with a weird Scandinavian name. And and looking at our at our legacy collection of of these bizarre plastic hairballs that that's hilarious and it's like fear is just funny. And even the successful print jobs, which are mostly just chot keys, right there's we didn't really succeed in printing anything of of real substance, and at least that's on

a large scale. The best thing I was able to print was a flat, uh flat thing in the shape of the state of Tennessee, which is my home state. I remember that we used to have a three D

printer before the one that we've got now. It was a smaller one, and I remember one of the things that printed, and I remember being blown away by it at the time was it was like a little castle tower kind of like right yeah, and it had windows in it and if you look through the windows, you can see a spiral staircase on the inside of the chess piecease. And there was that, and that just blew my mind. It printed, it printed a spiral staircase on

the inside of this thing. That's that first printer you had might have been a better one. It was. It was also it was also a much smaller one, and it was not capable of printing in two different colors of plastic simultaneously. But then you could argue neither was ours though it was designed to do so. Um, So yes, I would say that in large part it has failed

to deliver. However, that being said, I do not want to be completely dismissive, because we are very much aware of cases where three D printers, even consumer level three D printers, have made a remarkable difference in people's lives. One example of that are there's there are a couple of different projects where people have open sourced the design and production of prosthetics for kids who might not otherwise

be able to afford them. Yeah, and I like, like a whole bunch of high schoolers have done this, and it's amazing. Now, these prosthetics that are designed, they're not intended to be permanent replacements. They tend to be sort of a temporary thing while a child is still growing, because obviously that's going to require new prosthetics over the

course of of the person's life. But they are something that allows a child to have a little more utility, uh than they would otherwise, And so there's no denying that it's had an impact. And again, that was using consumer level three D printers. But that's a special case, right. We are not in the future where everybody has their own three D printer, where everyone is printing all the

physical things they need. Well, And it's not just that that hasn't happened yet, because you could still argue I guess that, well, maybe that's going to happen someday in the far future. It's just you know, no one would have expected such a thing to happen so soon. But I'm interested in the fact that that used to be a much more strongly represented narrative in tech journalism and the popular consciousness than it is today. I don't hear

people talking about that anymore. And it feels like the idea that that Back to the Future Part two had that we would have a fax machine in every room, yeah right, right, yeah, And so that kind of ground level enthusiasm for three D printers does not seem to be on the rise. And I also wanted to talk about some some specific market trends, like just economic trends

regarding three D printing. Yeah, because this can this can lead to evidence about whether or not that that we're actually seeing a bubble or if it's just no, we're just on the journey to that destination. We just haven't reached it yet. Yeah. I think that was really the first big boom year in the stock market for for companies that were offering commercial and consumer three D printing technologies for sale. UH. Stratusis was up a hundred and

sixty percent that year. That's that's pretty significant growth. Three D Systems was up two hundred and seventy stratess UH, and their stocks would continue to rise. The Stratusis maintained its growth longer. So Stratusis that you know, they said, well, we we do three D printing solutions, so they were one of the big consumer three D printing companies out there.

According to Nasdaq, the Stratusis stock price peaked around a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty dollars a share around the end of and it stayed high through the middle of but it has been falling ever since then. It's now close to about twenty bucks a share. That's a pretty significant drop, although I would need to look into it further to see make sure like they didn't have any stock splits or anything, because that can affect

the price as well. But oh yeah, but assuming that there weren't any splits, then yeah, that's not a great story. Uh again, Also three D Systems, I decided to look that up. The three D printer manufacturer three D Systems peaked closer to the beginning of at about a hundred bucks and has been mostly falling since then, is now out about fifteen bucks. Yeah, so if you look at market trends, it's it's looking pretty dire, right that that kind of leads to or leans us closer to the

conclusion that there was a bubble issue. Um. And you can you can also on the on the technology end, on the price end of the technology, kind of look at at how how it's been developing over that period of time, like like how how how low can you go? Um, Like like how how much can you make this available to people through price cuts? And and that affects there there are multiple effects that we would discuss your right,

like like you have the very low ends side. Once you get the price down to a certain amount, yes, you've made it more accessible to a larger audience. But chances are, you know, the phrase you get what you paid for it comes into play, right, So if you're paying a smaller amount for a three D printer, chances are it's not at the quality of one of the really good ones, which means the experience of the person has even though they now have access to a three

D printer, is not necessarily a positive experience. Yeah, And I think there's like a strange little curve happening in those prices over the past few years where wherein actually the prices have started to go up again for for some of the like base unit models. And we'll talk about this. So so at the back at the kind of kind of beginning of this trend, back in a the low end of consumer devices was a little bit above a thousand bucks a pop um. The low end

of of commercial devices was about ten thousand dollars. Yeah, by the end of we saw home units priced as low as two hundred. That's that's great. That's obviously not a advancement in the technology in that time, at least leading to that kind of pricing. I think what happens is this is an armchair analysis here, I would argue that what happens is in two thousand twelve UH and early two you see this incredible interest in the concept of three D printing. UH the media, and the media

has involved, Investors are involved. As they start to drive up the market value of various companies, other companies say, hey, we can make some money getting into this business too. We like money. So you get a lot more companies making a lot more three D printers. Along the entire range. You've got some that are making very expensive ones and some making budget ones, trying to hit that consumer market because once interest goes up super high, you can really

profit off of that. Right. People, people know what three D printing is, they've heard the term. They are eager to get involved in this. Uh. And if you're not already part of the hobbyist scene, you may not be aware of what devices really are the best ones. You may just see, oh, hey, I've heard of three D printing. This thing's on sale for two dollars. That's that's an

investment I feel comfortable making. It's like your well meaning uncle getting you and in Timbo for and you just started going like, well think thanks, Polly station three man, I played so many hours of Super Macio Brothers. It was Ralph Macchio, but they never named the other one. Yeah. Fun times anyway, So to kind of look at some where the spread is right now, if you're looking at like what's considered the best of three D printers in various categories. One of the resources I like is a

site called three D hubs dot com. I've used it before actually, because it also can put you in touch with people who run businesses where they print three D objects for you. You can send them the plans or and and in fact I used this a couple of times with some costume pieces I was able to send because because our printer, well it's awesome. I mean, I do really like our printer. It does definitely have some major problems that you've gotta babysit that thing which is

problematic because it takes so long to print. Um, it was just not gonna I think. I recall at the time, the size of the build plate was an issue. Yes, I needed something that was going to be larger and I and I didn't want to have to break the build up into too many smaller parts and then glue it all together. Uh. I did have it printed in

three parts because it was still pretty big. But I was able to go with use three D hubs to find someone and they were you know, they would oversee the build and make sure the quality was there, so I didn't have to worry about any of that. But three D hubs also has a section where they rate various three D printers that are on the market and they divide them up into categories that include enthusiast, plug and play, a budget and kits or d I Y projects.

So the costs have certainly come down over the last few years. I mean, when you look at when they were first on the market, you're talking in excess of five thousand dollars, but again by we're getting down to a round a thousand dollars. Today, if you want a really nice three D printer, you're still paying more than

a thousand dollars. It's not like it's not like computers where you could say, well, I'm gonna get a mid range computer and that's gonna be like a couple hundred bucks or five hundred dollars, maybe on on the higher end of mid range, and it's not like that. With three D printers, you're still really getting what you pay for.

Uh So, most of the reliable models they listed in the enthusiast category were around undred dollars, like the Make the Maker gear M two was the top performing printer in the enthusiast category, and that was at one thousand, eight hundred twenty five dollars. And also the enthusiast category. Enthusiast makes it sounds like sound like, Hey, I'm into did in three D printing. It means more than that. Enthusiast means you are educated in the in the field.

You are familiar with the way three D printers work, You're familiar with modeling software, you know, you know, you have the it's not a casual hobbyists. Yeah, you you have to be willing to go through that steep learning curve that a lot of these machines require, and this is one of them. They actually said, it is not easy to use. It's a great printer, but it is not intuitive. So it's one of those things that you know,

you start to make trades. Some of the other printers in that same category cost more than two thousand dollars. A couple were like when you went to the plug in play type, which simplifies matters, They make it a lot less complicated than some of the other models. You're still paying more than a thousand dollars. Even in the budget level. The printers that they listed as as good

reliable printers were five dollars or more. So, they didn't have anything below five hundred dollars that they actually considered to be a good three D print. Now that doesn't mean there aren't sub three D printers out there, they just might not be very user friendly or very effective. Now it's it's kind of hard to say what does price mean when it comes to demand, Like, has the

demand changed over time? It may very well be that three D printers has never as as a as a product, has never really branched out beyond a relatively small hobbyist community there. I'm sure it's made some advances beyond that, but I think at its core we're still looking at a niche market. I don't think we're looking at a general market for many many reasons. But you can't necessarily draw those conclusions just from the the cost or the

price of these products. Well, there is partially the fact that some companies have in fact stopped selling Yeah, those poorly performing uh cheap three D printers like in In January, three D Systems announced that it was going to stop selling um it's consumer level three D printers. The model that they're ditching is this industry unfavorite called Cube, which which retailed for about a thousand bucks, was generally reported to not work well, certainly not as well as competitors.

Um The company is maintaining its Cube Pro, which is a manufacturing grade unit which sells for about three thousand bucks and is better, better rated in the industry. But but yeah, I think that this kind of thing is is definitely indicative of the early consumer boom just being a hype bubble um and and you know, companies have had to realize that the technology isn't just the hardware.

It's the hardware and the software and neither is cheap enough or easy enough to use currently to to make three D printing at home but possible for that casual hobbyist. I think for printing to really be that compelling to a consumer, it has to be as dead simple as printing on paper. And the problem is it isn't. It's for multiple reasons it isn't. And like you were saying, Lauren,

it's it's the software and the hardware combined. There are complications on both ends that are barriers to entry for your average person. Uh, someone who's willing to really put in the work. Obviously they can they can do it. It's not like it's not like there's a bouncer outside the three D printer world that says, I'm sorry, you don't make the cut. But it means a lot more effort. It's not something like even the plug in play Uh, printers that are on three D hubs dot com aren't

necessarily completely intuitive and easy to use. They're less difficult to use than some of the other models. Yeah, but to get away from the technology itself for a moment and look, uh, you know, what is a what is a market analysts view of the overall uh you know, market outlook for three D printing companies. I did find in August CNBC article discussing this, it was talking about that year's collapse in value for three D printing companies.

And apparently, in as we've been talking about three D printing, it generated a lot of financial interest and a lot of investment, and in fourteen all that sort of started falling apart, not for everybody, though, as I noted earlier,

Stratusis was still doing well for most. But the article quotes a senior analystic Cannalysts named Tim Shepherd, and Shepherd says quote, I think last year we saw stock prices of some of the leading three D printing companies inflated beyond the level they should have been at based on hype, and investors jumped on the bandwagon. But this is a

market where there's a lot of misunderstanding. The reality is that it has huge potential to make a transformation to the way products are made and designed, but those will take a while to kick in. And I think that makes a lot of sense, essentially saying people people were getting excited about a thing they didn't understand, excited too early. And there is in fact recent news that that demonstrates this. Oh yeah, I mean there's still investment in three D

printing companies. I was just reading news from today or I think the past couple of days about a three D printing startup called Carbon that has received more than two hundred and twenty million in funding with investors like BMW, nikon Ge and the Japanese company js R um So that and that I think that's more on the industrial

scale and manufacturing side. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's on the production side of the manufacturing industry, and that's where a lot of three D printing now seems like it's being focused car parts, machine parts, aerospace parts, that that kind of thing, and uh even on the hobby end. I think that's largely what people have been using the technology from it. I mean, maybe not car parts, but but but y'all, there's so much three three D printed jewelry

on etc. Right now. One of those pieces is currently on my wife's wrist. I'm sure it's beautiful, it's it's it's nifty. She liked it. Yeah, so yeah, I was like, I I could have printed that for you would have taken could you would have taken about eight months? Could you? Uh so? Yeah? I mean, I guess the question is how if we're wanting to know how things have changed in three D printing since we were first talking about it, you know what, three three and a half years ago.

I think that over the past few years, various forms of additive manufacturing have proved useful in specific scenarios where it's worth investing in expensive, high quality technology, but at the consumer and hobbyist level, I think three D printing does sort of remain about as much of a novelty as it was two or three years ago. Um, I don't know what you all would think about that. I mean, has it reached a valley in the hype cycle and

if so, when's it going to recover? Well, you know, like like like looking looking at virtual reality, it's you know, like that had a public hay Day that was that was full of buzz about the incredible future, future future, and it was mainly focusing on these really like like far reaching entertainment applications, and and that failed so spectacularly that that was followed by a couple really kind of dark decades where the technology was still in use, but

very much so out of the public eye. You know, it was being used for for for psychological therapy, for for astronaut training, stuff like virtual boy, purposes, for for making yourself really nauseated. So that's not even virtual reality, is it. I mean, it's it was an attempt to try and create something approaching virtual reality. I Uh, I

definitely think that the there are parallels. So with virtual reality, you know, you had all this hype and The problem was when the public became aware of the actual state of the art of the technology at the time. This ain't like I've been hearing on the news exactly compared

it to the hype. The two had some gaps between them, I chasms, so much so that the term virtual reality a lot of people a lot of people decided that they weren't even going to use the term virtual reality to describe their work anymore because it was considered a Yeah, I had a stigma against it, so they started calling it virtual environments or other terminology to try and avoid VR. VR was considered toxic, and if you wanted to get funding for your projects, then you had to figure out

something else. And it also meant that the they had to the people who were working in that field. They were starting to repurpose other equipment to act as VR equipment because they no longer had the money to build their own, you know, their own specific devices. So you had this huge amount of hype, and then you had the public kind of catch up to where the actual technology was, and then once those could not be reconciled,

you saw a collapse. I think that's there's a really good parallel to be made with consumer three D printers in that respect. Um, Now, that's not saying that everyone was guilty of sharing this vision of a three D printer in every home and we're all printing out tables

and chairs and stuff like that. There were a lot of journalists who had a much more modest view about three D printing, and they were talking about how they saw three D printing being more of an important role, playing more of an important role in small businesses, in production centers, where you might have a a small business that prints on demand and build old objects on demand, which is kind of similar to what we have now, although I would argue that what we have now is

much more modest than even this projection. But this projection doesn't take into account the idea of an industry being overhyped and this collapsing in on itself somewhat right, if, in fact, we had had a closer, a more conservative build up with three D printing so many puns, then perhaps we wouldn't have had we wouldn't have had the precipitous fall, and we would see more examples of this.

But if you were to go to like three D hubs dot com and you wanted to have something printed, you could do that, and that's the kind of future that a lot of journalists I would follow we're talking about. They said, Yeah, I don't really think that this technology is appropriate for the average person to have hooked up to their PC because it has such a high demand on your time and attention to get to a point where you're really comfortable using it effectively, that it's outside

the realm of most consumers. So, uh, you know, they those people, I think we're being responsible there they were and being more grounded and realistic. Uh, it was not enough to counteract the hype where everyone was saying, look at the potential for this stuff and just equating that to being like right around the corner and we'll all have it at our fingertips all the time. Um, there are some big problems that we need to be solved for us to fix this. Because you asked, are we

in a valley? And if so, do we ever climb out of it? And if so, when I mean, I assume we will at some point. I'm just thinking, how long will it take. I don't know that consumer three D printers are ever going to be a huge product. I think I think, I think it's like not the foreseeable future, like like I could see it in I mean maybe maybe the classic forty years, maybe even longer

than that. When you get to a point where it truly is intuitive, it's easy to use the it's easy to load, it's easy to uh switch out materials, especially once we get to a point where the same device can print in multiple materials. We're seeing prototypes of that now on the professional side, nothing close to the consumer side. But if we get to that then maybe, But right now I would say that I think consumer three D printers are pretty much um consigned to being in the

hobbyist realm and not not going much further than that. Um. So the challenge then is how many or really the question is how many companies will either have to switch their strategies so that they're making more professional level materials and fewer consumer ones, and which ones are just going to completely go out of business because they have dedicated themselves to producing a product for which there is no

sustainable market. You know, uh, well, you know, as as we've as we've been saying, it sounds like a lot of companies are in fact making that switch, and it's it's why we are continuing to read a lot of headlines, or not even headlines, but maybe stories that are incorporating three D printing technology. Yeah, there's still life in the hobbyist realm. So while I'm being kind of doom and gloom, it's not like the hobbyists are going away. It's not

like they're less passionate about using three D printers. And it's not like they're not pushing the envelope with what three D printers are capable of doing. They are doing all of those things. It's just it's a smaller population than your general PC owner population. Sure. Sure, on the professional level though, the print printers that are being produced

are getting more detailed. Um. I've seen a couple of stories in the past couple of months about using three D printers to to for example, to create thin plastic membranes like like for you and fuel cells or water treatment or food processing that have very very finely patterned surfaces to help with particle flow or even with ion flow.

UM or another example these a foam like microstructures that are three D printed that can retain their long term stability and usability better than traditionally manufactured materials, meaning that, like, like anything foami ish, like, like insulating material, shock absorbing stuff of flotation devices could could be made to last longer without breaking or without needing to be replaced. Yeah, that that is something that we didn't really touch on.

But three D printing has really advanced our understanding of material science anyways, like and even even given us the opportunity to play with some levels of micro structures up down to a certain scale. It's hard to use the additive manufacturing, especially the traditional three D printing technologies for anything truly truly tiny. For that, you've got to go with a slightly different approach. It's still sometimes called three

D printing, but doesn't involve an extruder. Yeah, right, right, But it's why I like, like tissue printing hasn't hasn't really taken off yet, or hasn't really reached a level of usability yet. Getting down to the cellular level is not a little bit of a challenge. Yeah, there's been a lot of progress in developing three D printers that are capable of using different materials for one job, that

was one I had mentioned. So for years, three D printing has primarily been used for prototyping, but if you are able to print in multiple materials, that increases the utility of a printer and allows it to become a real manufacturing tool, so you can actually print a full product as opposed to like printing the shell or the casing or something pizza or a pizza. Yeah, I mean

three D printed food. It's a thing. But imagine being able to print out an entire circuit board everything, Like you're able to print the substrate and then you're able to print the actual circuitry and have it all design that way. Tell me when will we print man long pig? Well, we're going back to food. And of course there's been a lot of stories about three D printing and medical applications, not just the ones about printing organs, not just for cannibalism.

Yeah yeah, not not just kidney. That's a good thing. I have two of them because I want seconds. Um. The the goal of printing oregans is obviously one of those that we are striving for in medicine. But beyond that, we're talking about like the prosthetics. Uh, we're talking about

um uh, some really interesting stuff. I read about a story from the Autonomous University of Puebla, which is actually the oldest university in Mexico, and in fact it's better known as the Benamerta Universe Universe adad Autonoma the Puebla in my accent is terrible, I know, I apologize, But they've developed a three D printed bio material that mimics

bone and actually facilitates bone regen narration. So yeah, you often see this coming up in regenerative medicine and stuff like that, where there they need to substrate to to to apply the scaff material to. Yeah, and the substrate very often is a three D printed one because they

can custom make it to their specifications. And then also something that goes hand in hand with three D printing technology and modeling is using scanners being able to scan physical objects so that you can create the three D virtual model and then print a replica of it. We're starting to see a lot more of those kind of entering that prosumer consumer market, which that that removes a big barrier, assuming it works well and assuming it has

an intuitive interface, which are two big assumptions. I know. Uh, it does remove part of the barrier, which is building out those virtual models for as as a plan to send to a three D printer that that is a skill that is uh not easy to attain. It requires a lot of practice, a lot of work. And if you have a scanner, then you can kind of do

some shortcuts. Right. If you can actually scan the thing you want to print, and it's able to create a an accurate virtual replica and you are able to send that to a printer, you avoid a lot of steps that otherwise would take you a very long time to to do, especially if you had not had a lot

of experience and computer aided design. So we're seeing that as well, and maybe that will increase the hobbyist population a little bit because you've removed one of the barriers there, but you still have other issues, like just the idea that you have to sometimes babysit printing jobs and make sure that everything is going all right and not turning into the plastic thread of doom the way it would here. So, I mean, I would hope that we would get out

of that valley. I would love to see three D printing get a or like realistic uh standing, and and increase in popularity, but at a natural rate as opposed to a hyped rate where you do have this bubble burst. I think we did an episode, and I may be

wrong about this. I know I've talked about it before about how uh people tend to frame technologies as having a particular um course where you've got the hype part of products uh uh existence, and then you've got the peak, and then you've got the decline, and then eventually it levels out, and sometimes they level out higher up than

other technologies do. Uh. And I remember actually looking at a map of one where it was really interesting because it it put different technologies along that pathway, saying like three D printing at that time was still on the upward climb for hype, uh, and other technologies that had been out for a bit, like three D televisions were

on the down words slope, right. So uh And some of sometimes you could argue the hype is something that was not necessarily fostered, right, That just kind of happens because people get excited about it and it just sort of has an organic build to its own. In other cases, it's very much a fostered approach, where it has been a manufactured attempt to to increase interest in something in order to sell more units. Uh. We've we've seen examples of both. I would argue three D television falls into

that second category a little more than the first. I might be biased. I also covered three D televisions for so many years that, uh, I'm a little bitter about it. Yeah. No, I remember like every CS you would come back when when I was on tech stuff and we would just sit there and you would be like, yep, there were some there were some of those. Ye, mansion televisions have gotten so three dimensional they have. I mean, there's it's weird because he's still trying to do that, not as much,

not as much now. That was that was a real effort for uh, not just television companies, but but content companies like Sony that does both. That it was a real attempt to push that technology as a way of of adding perceived value because there because once you hit a certain resolution, uh, it's really hard to convince people that you're getting that much more out of your device than you were before. Same thing is true with three

D printers. Another great example three D printerers, you get to a certain point beyond that your your returns are so low you're getting a reduced return, like you you might be paying five dollars more for what appears to be a relatively subtle improvement in performance. Uh, fewer and fewer people are willing to make that leap. Same thing is true, and lots of different technologies obviously, but this

was kind of fun to look at. I mean, it was one of those things where you know you can't help but feel maybe a little sad that the hype was overinflated things so quickly, because you know, it makes it harder to make progress. Once that bubble bursts. Doesn't mean necessarily everything goes away. The Internet didn't go away after the dot com bubble burst, but man, things were messy for about two years. It was it was not an easy industry to work in. Uh, but that's a

story for another time. So this was interesting, and Joe, thank you for suggesting it. It was Joe's idea that we revisit this particular topic. And uh so, guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics or a topic you would like us to revisit, why not write us let us know about it, because otherwise we won't know and we'll just continue on with our very little lives.

You can get in touch with us by writing to us our email addresses FW Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. Over at Twitter, we are f W thinking. Just search FW thinking in Facebook's handy dandy searchbar, our little profile will pop up and you can leave us a message there and we will talk to you again releases. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com h brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places