NASA has thrown a $125,000 grant at a research project to bring 3D-printed pizza into our reality.

Check it out:

That’s a prototype printing chocolate. I know it sort of looks like a fraught-with-science version of a Willy Wonka movie prop, but that machine is actually synthesizing chocolate from cartridges containing sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein, and so on.

The NASA-funded project comes from mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor of Systems & Materials Research Corporation. Coincidentally, Contractor was also a speaker at the recent Humans to Mars conference.

Related: A 3D printer you can order today prints both solids and liquids, so you can “print” food and drinks.

Naturally, this kind of food replication would be a great way to survive in space or on other planets, where plant-growing natural resources are scarce. But it’s also a great idea for feeding hungry people around the world when economics, famine, or war come between people and sustenance.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” the engineer told Quartz. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”

Here’s a diagram of how the contraption works, courtesy of Systems & Materials Research Corporation:

SAN MATEO, Calif. — 3D printers haven’t quite made the leap to mainstream — they’re still a bit too finicky, unreliable, and expensive for most consumers — but they’re getting close. Next month, you’ll be able to buy a 3D Systems Cube printer at Staples for about $1,300.

We got a look at the 3D-printed future at Maker Faire Bay Area here.

At least a dozen companies are offering consumer- and hobbyist-friendly 3D printers now. They range in price from about $800 to $3,000 or more. Some, like the earliest models, can only make small plastic objects no larger than a few inches on a side. The biggest can (or will soon be able to) print objects up to two feet on a side out of a variety of materials, including ABS plastic, PLA plastic, nylon, ceramics, Play-Doh, cupcake frosting, and even hot liquids. (The days when you can tell your replicator you’d like a cup of “Earl Grey, hot” — well, that’s not quite here yet, but will be soon.)

And if you’re not ready to make the leap to running your own 3D printer, you can work up 3D printing files on your computer (using software like Autodesk’s 123D app, an easy-to-use 3D design studio) and send them off to service providers like Shapeways.

There are so many makers of 3D printers and 3D-printed gadgets that the organizers of Maker Faire gave them an entire section of the main expo hall. The gallery here is far from an exhaustive look at this budding field — but it should give you a sense of how many options there are for 3D printing enthusiasts today.

Top photo: Makerbot Industries has done more than any other company to kick off the home 3D printing market. Its printers are looking more polished and professional than ever: Instead of the plywood look of the early models, this fourth-generation Makerbot has a black powder-coated steel chassis and decorative purple lighting on the inside that give it a futuristic look. The new MakerBot Replicator 2 can print objects in PLA plastic up to 11.2x6x6.1 inches with a resolution of 0.1mm. It costs $2,199.

Augmented reality and 3D printing, while very different technologies, circle around the same general concept: bridging the gap between the physical world and the digital world. 3D printing makes the digital physical, and augmented reality enhances the physical world with digital overlays.

So what happens when you combine them? This question was at the heart of a project created by Dutch new media artist Sander Veenhof and designer Joris van Tubergen, who fused the worlds of 3D printing and augmented reality in a really interesting way.

The concept, dubbed the “UltimARker”, allows 3D printer owners to get a real-time preview of their 3D designs as their devices create them. Along with the design overlay, the UltimARker (which is a play on the name of the Ultimaker 3D printer and “AR” or “augmented reality”) also displays information like how long the printer’s been at work, and, in theory, how long it will take a job to complete. You can see how this works in the video below.

While the project doesn’t seem to have all that many practical applications yet, it is a very interesting proof of concept of what happens when you combine two technologies that don’t seem to have very much in common. With the idea of augmented reality glasses and 3D printing both becoming increasingly popular, you can expect to see projects like this a lot more often.

Here’s a link to the project’s Thingiverse page.

One of the great fears in the 3D printing community is that overeager politicians will use concerns over 3D printed guns to regulate 3D printers themselves.

That fear may soon be realized. State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) says he wants regulation that would track 3D printers and figure out what people are doing with them. This means measures like background checks and a system that would force printer owners to register their devices before they can use them.

The source of Yee’s concerns is, of course, the Liberator, the 3D-printed firearm Defense Distributed announced last week (and was forced to take from its website soon after).

“We must be proactive in seeking solutions to this new threat rather than wait for the inevitable tragedies this will make possible,” Yee said in a press release .

Yee is no stranger to the gun debate. The state senator has been on the most outspoken critics of assault weapons, which he proposed legislation to ban last year. “It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear — there is no debate, no discussion,” he told CBS San Francisco last May.

But while Yee’s attitudes toward assault weapons seems pretty well grounded, there are more than a few problems with his desire to regulate 3D printers. For one, while 3D printing is a relatively new technology, it doesn’t give bad guys any tools they didn’t already have access to. If you really want to create a gun in your garage, there are plenty of existing ways for you to do it that don’t require a 3D printer.

The other problem with Yee’s idea is that … well, it doesn’t make much sense. The 3D printer is closer to the personal computer than the AK-47, which makes forcing owners to register them seem excessive. (This assumes that the 3D printer can even be regulated, a notion that’s still up for debate.)

Even prominent anti-3D-printed gun advocate Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) didn’t go as far as to implicate 3D printers themselves in a recent letter. For him, it was all about the undetectable nature of the plastic firearms, not what created them. That, as Public Knowledge vice president Michael Weinberg pointed out, was a welcome sign that the 3D printed gun debate was maturing.

Fortunately for the 3D printing community, Yee says he isn’t quite sure how his regulation would work — which means that your 3D printer is safe, at least for now.

Cody R. Wilson is disappointed.

Sitting in front of him at a conference in New York City are fifty or so 3D printing enthusiasts, investors, and reporters, all of whom are eager to hear what the face of the 3D printed gun movement has to say about his dangerous new pastime.

But there’s one problem: The room is half empty. Wilson was expecting more interest, more animosity.

“This is bizarre to me. I’ll have to think about what this means,” Wilson said at the podium, mostly to himself.

Wilson’s disappointment is perhaps understandable: Over the past year, the 25 year-old law student has become the face of the budding, controversial 3D-printed gun movement. Reception to this, however, has been less than positive. Wilson’s exploits have not only upset those in the 3D printing world, but they’ve also been severe enough to warrant death threats, questioning from the U.S. government, and a persistent concern that he may one day have to flee the country.

Like most troublemakers, Cody Wilson lives for the fight and the controversy (though the more cynical take is that just likes the attention).”I want that feeling of opposition. That animates me,” he told me.

That opposition is in great supply these days. Earlier this week, Wilson unveiled the Liberator, the first gun created entirely with a 3D printer. The gun’s only metal components are its firing pin and a slug of steel designed to set off metal detectors.

Within hours of the news,Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) responded, writing a letter expressing his distaste for what Wilson had created.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms,” Israel said.

Israel wasn’t alone. Days later, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also chimed in, confirming that he would support legislation to ban 3D-printed firearms.

Source: Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson’s Liberator was both groundbreaking and controversial. (Source: Defense Distributed)

The worst of the opposition came just a few days ago, when the U.S. State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance ordered Wilson to remove the Liberator design files from his site. Wilson, however, didn’t seem too perturbed: The files had already been downloaded over 100,000 times. They were everywhere.

“Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it — to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about,” Wilson told BetaBeat.

The U.S. government still isn’t letting Defense Distributed host the files, but Cody Wilson’s mission to distribute them is already complete.

3D printing your way to freedom

While much of the talk on Defense Distributed focuses on firearms, Wilson says the effort is about so much more. ”This project is a way for me to do everything I was ever interested in all at the same time. I want to represent this position in a very pure, forceful way, and I think we did it,” he said.

To understand that position, you first have to understand the idea of “crypto-anarchy,” which holds that the most effective route to political freedom is a combination of unhindered access to information protected by the hard math of cryptography. Wilson, a crypto-anarchist himself, argues that everyone has a right to download their own firearms regardless of how many governmental bodies say they shouldn’t.

Cody Wilson, a known troublemaker, lives to create headaches for regulators. (Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat)

That’s where 3D printers come in. Because the technology enables us to digitize and replicate physical objects, 3D printers give crypto-anarchists (or even just gun enthusiasts) a powerful new tool to circumvent governmental control: Once people digitize and disseminate 3D gun files, it becomes a lot harder for law enforcement to regulate them — which is exactly Wilson’s goal. Defense Distributed is blurring the line between gun regulation and censorship by making guns information rather than just objects.

The 3D-printed gun movement isn’t about guns, then, but about what guns represent. As Wilson noted in a Reddit AMA last month, guns are soaked with symbolism.“Printed guns aren’t even proven technology and are extremely impractical devices from my experience. But there is a symbolic advantage to the individual in being at least capable of printing one,” he said.

Click, print, kill?

Keep in mind that we’re talking about guns here. Is Wilson prepared for the possibility of someone one day using his inventions to kill?

”I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people. That’s what it is — it’s a gun,” he told Forbes this week. While that isn’t the most morally sound stance, it’s clear that Wilson is beyond concerns over the harm his inventions could cause.

More, Wilson doesn’t argue against claims that his project will give people increased access to guns because giving people increased access to guns — digital or otherwise–  is his organization’s mission:

“[Defense Distributed's goal is] to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.”

Here’s the reality: Anyone who’s really looking to get their hands on a gun already has more than a few options at their disposal — including CNC-milled firearms, $2 dollar zip guns, and AK-47s created with garden shovel parts. 3D printing really isn’t giving the bad guys of the world anything they didn’t already have access to. But the tech could make procurement easier.

“This technology would probably not increase total access but rather the convenience in procuring some type of gun,” RJ Miller, a 3D-printed gun enthusiast told me.

Right now, though, 3D printing a gun is anything but easy. While getting your hands on a gun design file is as simple as a few mouse clicks, actually printing that file is almost the complete opposite, as The Atlantic’s Phillip Bump extensively details.

It won’t always be that way, of course. 3D printers are becoming more common, and Wilson is already working on improvements to the Liberator — so all of this bound to get easier. As much as politicians and gun regulation proponents hate to hear it, what Defense Distributed is working on is going to be really difficult to stop.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zcopley/5914558006/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Like Bitcoin, Defense Distributed is all about using technology to fight regulation. (Image source: Flickr/Zcopley)

Gunning for the future

Defense Distributed, at its core, isn’t just a technical exercise in the possibilities of 3D printing; it’s a political statement meant to show governments how technology can disrupt their capability to create and enforce laws. 3D-printed guns are Wilson’s answer to Wikileaks and Bitcoin: He wants to use information to engineer both freedom and governmental impotence regardless of the possibility that bad guys will do the same.

“If we begin second-guessing every potential illicit use of a technology and restricting it from the outset because of fear, we’re not going to progress as a society,” said Michael Guslik (aka Have Blue), the mind behind the original 3D-printed lower receiver design.

The 3D-printed gun movement also means a lot to 3D printing itself, as it takes the technology’s “make anything” imperative and pushes it to its most logical extreme: If 3D printers can create whatever you think up, why not create a gun, a sex toy, or even a car?

“Why would I run a 3D printer if I can’t make the things that are worth making? 3D printing is all about unintended uses,” Wilson said.

And if all of this talk about guns is too glum for you, just know that these “unintended uses” extend beyond that of dangerous objects like firearms. Seeing as some people are printing out prosthetic hands for kids, it’s clear that 3D printing enthusiasts can take take the technology just about wherever their minds go.

Cody R. Wilson’s mind just took him to guns.

While a lot of the focus on 3D printing these days is people can use it to take lives, the technology can be used to improve them as well.

One example of this is the Robohand, a prosthetic appendage created in part by a MakerBot 3D printer. The idea was born after Richard Van As, a South African woodworker, lost his fingers in an on-the-job accident.

Enter the 3D printer, Van As, along with prop designer Ivan Owen, used to create the Robohand, a $150 alternative to more expensive prosthetics.

With the invention, Van As and Owen could restore hand functionality to those afflicted with diseases like amniotic band syndrome, which causes children to be born without fingers and toes.

While there’s not much that I can tell you that the video below can’t say better, there are a few key takeaways here. One, while MakerBot has traditionally shown off the Replicator’s capability to print out a variety of rather useless widgets, it’s clear that the technology has use cases that extend far beyond that. 3D printing can — and clearly, has — changed lives.

Also, as Van As points out in the video, 3D printing was vital to the creation of the Robohand, which the designers were able to prototype much faster thanks to MakerBot’s technology.

“The Makerbot and being able to swap files up and down via the Internet cut our prototyping down from a week to 20 minutes. It was incredibly fast,” he said.

More notably, Van As and Owen placed the Robohand’s design files on Thingiverse, MakerBot design file repository. The move means that anyone with access to a 3D printer can download the files and create their own Robohand (though Van As recommends consulting an occupational therapist to help with the fitting of the device).

As amazing as the project is, it’s not the first of its kind. Last year a Delaware hospital developed a 3D printed exoskeleton for a 2-year-old born without use of her hands. The project, like this one, shows that there are uses for 3D printers that not even their inventors have thought of yet.

And while some have taken that idea an applied it to firearms, others are going in a different, but equally interesting direction. And we can only applaud them for that.

Politicians aren’t too crazy about this whole 3D printed gun thing.

At a press conference on Sunday, New York senator Charles Schumer said he would support legislation to ban 3D printed guns like the one Defense Distributed announced on Friday (and has been teasing for quite some time).

“A terrorist, someone who’s mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,” Schumer said.

Schumer joins fellow New York  politician Steve Israel, who has been one of the most vocal critics of what Defense Distributed is working on.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms,” he said.

While Israel and other politicians have been on the 3D printed gun case for months now, the situation has gotten a lot more dire now that Defense Distributed has created a completely plastic gun that fires real bullets.

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson understands the dangers that could come of his controversial project. ”I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people. That’s what it is — it’s a gun,” he told both Forbes and the BBC.

The design files for Wilson’s firearm, dubbed the “Liberator”, are freely available online, which means anyone — yes, including you — can download it. For Wilson, it’s a dream fulfilled, but for gun control advocates, it’s a nightmare realized.

In case you haven’t seen what everyone’s so upset about, take a look at the video below.

With a little over 24 hours left on its fundraising campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, Canadian startup Matterform has substantially surpassed its goal for its low cost 3D scanner called the Photon. The company has raised over C$400,000, more than quadrupling its goal of C$81,000 when the campaign started a little over 30 days ago.

The 3D printing space seems to be hitting its stride of late. As we reported last week, Andreesen Horowitz are investing $30M in 3D printing company, Shapeways. While companies such as Shapeways cater to product designers, lowering the price point of these machines is essential to opening up the market to regular consumers. Makerbot offers 3D printers for a couple thousand dollars. And Mcor recently announced a new printer that uses layers of paper to obtain a finished 3D object, saving costs on materials. Startups such as Printrbot and Makibox hope to expand the market further by offering 3D printers below $500.

Nevertheless, learning how to use 3D modeling software and creating new designs is not for the faint of heart and is an obstacle to more mainstream adoption. So as affordable 3D printers proliferate, we may see a growing demand for 3D scanners, too, such as the one Matterform’s offering. Rather than having to create your own design, a 3D scanner would allow you to simply scan an existing physical object and then print out a copy.

While 3D scanners can currently run more than a couple thousand dollars to purchase, several players are working to manufacture low-cost scanners that even home users could purchase. For instance, Makerbot, has announced plans for a low-cost scanner sometime in the near future. Matterform, for its part, is charging C$599 for its Photon scanner via its crowdfunding campaign and has announced that shipments of the first units will happen by July or August.

Matterform’s Photon 3D scanner works by shooting dual laser lines at an object as it rotates while pictures are taken with an HD camera. The process takes about three minutes with a digital 3D model created on the computer. When not in use, it folds up into a compact case that can be stowed. According to cofounder Drew Cox, “this is the first 3D scanner that is affordable for the home consumer market.”

Its crowdfunding success notwithstanding, Matterform enters a market with existing competitors readying their own products for the same target market. The product design and prototype have certainly energized enough of a following to fund their first batch of products. The company’s eventual success will depend on how well they can build a sustainable business and stay competitive in this emerging space.

NEW YORK CITY — For a slightly unconventional take on 3D printing, consider Mcor Technologies’ Iris Printer.

Unlike the plastics-based printers of companies like Makerbot and 3D Systems, Mcor’s Iris printer creates 3D objects with layers of paper.

Mcor CEO Conor MacCormack says using paper gives the Iris a number of advantages over other printers, the most obvious of which is that the Iris can print out some impressively colorful 3D objects. (See the iPhone photo below.)

“Because we use paper and a water-based adhesive, the color that you have on the screen is very close to the color of the printed parts. And that’s unique,” MacCormack told me.

And he’s right: While plastics-based printers create some impressive objects, they’re not particularly comprehensive on the color-font, to say the least.

The other, perhaps more surprising, thing is that the Iris’s creations really don’t feel like they’re made of paper. There’s a significant weight to them, and they often feel like they’re made of something like sandstone.

You may not believe this, but this iPhone was 3D printed with, um, paper.

But while the quality of the printouts is a big deal, MacCormack says the more key advantage of Mcor’s tech is how much money it saves designers.

“The big issue, and why we got into 3D printing in the first place, is the running cost. It’s one thing to reduce the costs of  machines, but that’s not too helpful when the running costs are going in the opposite direction,” he said.

Basically, Mcor’s tech not only allows designers to print out full-color designs, but it does so in a way that’s highly affordable.

(It was here that I asked, as any good journalist should, for concrete numbers: How much does printing in paper as opposed to plastic actually save designers? Sadly, MacCormack didn’t have the numbers in front of him, but he did say the savings were “significant”. )

The other neat thing to note about Mcor is that the company last year teamed up with Staples to bring 3D printing to Staples stores. While the initial trials have been limited to the Netherlands, MacCormack says it’s not too crazy to assume that Staples could one day bring the partnership elsewhere — in particular, the U.S.

“It’s up to Staples to decide, but eventually you’ll be able to upload your designs and have them printed out at a local Staples store,” he said.

So instead of printing on paper, Staples could one day let you print with paper. Welcome to the future, folks.

If you weren’t sure whether this whole consumer 3D printing thing was going take off, Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz  may help alleviate your doubt.

Dixon and company are making a hugely symbolic $30 million investment in Shapeways, a 3D printing marketplace that lets designers upload and print their 3D creations.

Shapeways is not only Dixon’s first investment at Andreessen Horowitz, it’s also the first one the firm is making in a 3D printing company. Which makes all of this something of a big deal.

So why 3D printing? And why Shapeways? And why now? Dixon’s reasoning is simple: 3D printing’s moment has come, and Shapeways is leading the charge.

“3D printing is important because so much of what we’ve done over the last 20 years has been moving bits around. Now we’re starting to see tech impact the physical world,” said Dixon, who is joining the Shapeways board of directors.

According to Dixon, Shapeways does three things well: Not only has it created a strong community, but it’s also built a strong service model and factory footprint. (It opened a New York City factory in October.) ”It’s like building three different companies at once,” Dixon told me. “We think they’ve executed well on all those things. They’re the clear leader in the space.”

(Sidenote: If you follow Dixon’s blog, it should be clear that he’s been thinking about this stuff for a while. As he noted in a post earlier this month, people tend to be skeptical of new technologies before there are obvious uses for them, and 3D printing is no exception.)

Shapeways’ focus on 3D printing as a service rather than just a technology is also an important factor. Unlike hardware-focused companies like MakerBot and 3D Systems, Shapeways’ strategy assumes — probably correctly — that people will be more likely to adopt 3D printing if they don’t have to invest in their own printers.

And yet, Shapeways’ take on 3D printing still faces a major hurdle — awareness.

“Our challenge now is making sure more people see the use in our service. We want to make this real for people,” Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen told me. “Making 3D printing accessible is a big challenge,” he said.

“A lot of it is an education thing,” said Dixon. “People are often very surprised by the quality of the printed things — but you can’t fully tell by looking at a website. Awareness will take some time.”

Still, despite the challenges facing Shapeways, the company is doing pretty well for itself so far: Weijmarshausen said the company’s 300,000 users upload 60,000 product designs each month — so the community is certainly there.

Much of that interest certainly ties into the fact that Shapeways is not only helping to make manufacturing local again, but is also opening the door for many more designers to make cash off their creations.

“In the same way the Internet unlocked the long tail of publishing, Shapeways is trying to do that with manufacturing,” said Dixon.

All of this, again, is still in its early stages, but Weijmarshausen is confident the industry is on the verge of something big. “We’re just scratching the surface of what the future of products will look like,” Weijmarshausen said.

Perhaps Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz will help Shapeways scratch a bit deeper.

3D-printed space technology is no longer science fiction, as NASA and other space companies are making it a reality.

Engineers and researchers at the Ames Research Center are already working with 3D printing technology to make it applicable for use in both space travel and the study of our universe, according to a recent CNET report.

The potential for 3D printing on space travel is endless. The technology itself can theoretically allow structures like satellites and spacecraft to be built in space, and it’s being developed here on earth.

One private company, Made in Space, is already piloting zero gravity 3D printing. It started testing in early 2011, and has made great strides in the future of out of this world 3D printing and design.

The company is working under a contract with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and they are building the first zero gravity 3D printer for space. The project, The 3D Printing in Zero-G Experiment, will launch into the atmosphere in 2014 headed to the International Space Station (ISS).

Earlier this year, MakerBot, one of the foremost producers of 3D printers, confirmed that NASA engineers were using the technology to build parts for models, including the Mars Rover Curiosity. NASA is now the company’s biggest customer, the company told Forbes.

However, 3D technology isn’t limited to science and technology exploration. From helping blind people ‘see’ paintings to creating weapons and firearms, 3D printing technology seems to make to anything your imagination can create.

Thingiverse, an online platform for 3D printing fans, has a variety of unique items available for printing ranging from gadgets and models to art and fashion accessories.

As the conversation and disruption around 3D printing technologies continues to evolve and becomes more than simple models, NASA and other companies are proving it can revolutionize design and manufacturing – taking it all the way out of this world.

Photo credit: NASA

For the visually impaired, the basic problem with art is that they can’t see it. But with a project called “Midas Touch” a group of Harvard kids say they have a fix: Use 3D printing to help the blind “see” what they cannot actually see.

“We want to bridge the gap between the visually impaired and the visual world of art,” Constantine Tarabanis, one of the brains behind the project, told me.

Basically, what Midas Touch does is take a flat image — say, of “Starry Night” — and use 3D printing to add layers of texture to it, creating an image that’s half painting, half relief sculpture. Essentially, Midas Touch takes the visual nature of art and translates it to a physical world that the visually impaired can understand.

In theory, anyway. The thing to keep in mind with Midas Touch is that the whole project is at this point a concept. While Tarabanis and his team have a great idea and a bunch of funding, they’re still working on creating working prototypes to prove their idea has legs.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Midas Touch says its work is like “painting in 2.5 dimensions”

As result, its a bit tough to fully understand or even convey what we’re talking about here — and somehow, I’m fine with that: In fact, the inability to describe Midas Touch is in its own way a meta-reference to what the project is trying to accomplish. How do you understand something that you can’t see?

The experience isn’t new to Tarabanis, who also had trouble describing the idea of 3D printing to his visually impaired friend, George. (George, in case you were curious, helped inspire the creation of Midas Touch.)

“People with vision have a incomplete understanding how the world of the visually impaired is different from ours. A lot of sensory stuff isn’t meaningful,” he said.

Nowhere is this idea more true than with color, which the Midas Touch team hasn’t let managed to figure out.

“Color is important, but people with vision tend to overestimate its value,” Tarabanis said. To solve the color problem, the Midas Touch team considered linking certain hues with certain textures — smooth for blue, rough for red — but eventually they ran up against that same problem: Correlating textures with colors doesn’t have much significance to the visually impaired.

All of this underscores why the Midas Touch project is so interesting. At a time when the discussion of 3D printing has largely revolved around its capability to create weapons, it’s interesting to see people applying the technology to arguably more useful things. And that’s enough reason to pay attention to what Tarabanis and his team are doing.

Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

If you’re the type of person who gets really excited about people building actual businesses off of 3D printing, I have some good and bad news about smartphone case maker UCreate3D.

The good news: Using 3D printing, UCreate3D solves one of most basic problems about smartphone cases: Getting a decent one for a device that’s not an iPhone or the latest Samsung Galaxy phone.

UCreate3D is fulfilling one of the promises of 3D printing.

In that sense, UCreate3D gets to the heart of what makes 3D printing so special: Because the technology is fast and cheap, small manufacturers can use it to create objects in small batches, satisfying demand while avoiding major investments in new technology. The 3D printing processes is all about the long tail of product demand.

“For 95 percent of phones, there are no decent cases available. Either that or you have those ugly sleeves. There’s really no choice for consumers,” UCreate3D co-founder Vincent van de Poll told me.

It’s a neat idea. By using 3D printing, UCreate3D can create cases for any device — no matter how obscure . If anything shows how powerful 3D printing can be, it’s that idea.

The bad news is mostly just disappointing  While UCreate3D is using the current hype surrounding 3D printing to ride the waves of publicity, the operation doesn’t intend to keep advertising its cases as 3D-printed. “3D printing is cool, but it shouldn’t be our main selling point in sixth months. By then we will focus more on the case and customization aspect,” van de Poll said.

That’s a bit sad to hear. 3D printing may be a buzzword now, but it’s always interesting to see people building actual businesses from it. Frankly I’m surprised that UCreate3D wants to suppress that side of its business.

“The emphasis will be more on the product than the technique. It shouldn’t matter how a product is produced, the end result is what counts,” van de Poll said.

If you’re a 3D printing pioneer with a focus on innovation, patents are probably the last thing on your mind. And that could be your undoing.

While lots of experts have argued that our current patent system is almost irrevocably broken across all industries, it poses a particular problem for young ones like 3D printing. Why? Because 3D printing folk are so busy innovating that they’re not paying enough attention to how existing patents factor into their work.

It’s a big problem, but fortunately organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are paying attention to it.”We don’t want the 3D printing industry to become a minefield of patent holders going after tinkerers. That’s a dangerous spot to be in,” EFF attorney Julie Samuels told me.

While overly broad patents aren’t too much of an issue for 3D printing now, it won’t be long until the industry grows to the point where it makes financial sense for patent holders to start suing growing 3D printing companies. (Just consider what’s already happening with the podcasting industry, for example.)

To avoid this fate, the EFF asked a bold, albeit slightly tough question: How do we figure out which patents are the most overreaching and could pose the most trouble down the line?

Answering the question has proved difficult for two reasons: One, the process of going through the patent archives is as slow as it is onerous (just look at the patent office’s website!), and, two, it’s often tough to figure out which patents are worth going after.

This has something to do with chocolate … I think.

To help figure this out, the EFF recently teamed up with AskPatents, a Stack Exchange site for patent applications where lawyers, experts, and enthusiasts can submit evidence against broad patent claims.

Core to this effort is the fairly new “preissuance submissions” process, which allows anyone to refute a patent’s legitimacy by submitting evidence (i.e, “prior art“) proving that the patented idea already exists. So when the EFF submits a questionable patent (as it’s done here and here), it also asks users to do some detective work. How legit are these claims?

“We really wanted to take advantage of the tight relationships and institutional knowledge of the 3D printing community,” Samuels said.

While all of this sounds promising, lots of concerns remain. For one, because the procedure is so new, Samuels says she’s not entirely sure how things are going to work out. In theory, once the EFF submits a valid claim, the patent examiner will then send the patent back to its applicant and ask them to narrow their patent’s focus.

But some of the patents in question are so broad that making them any narrower would render them completely unrecognizable. Consider “Additive Manufacturing System and Method for Printing Customized Chocolate Confections” a patent filed by 3D printer maker Stratasys that describes a system for — you guessed it — printing with chocolate.

As commenters in the AskPatents thread point out, that’s a pretty broad, obvious claim, and there’s tons of prior art that predates (and possibly invalidates) Stratasys’s application.

The other thing to hammer home here is that broad patents are a problem with all industries — not just 3D printing. Samuels and the EFF know this, which is why they intend to use their current project as an example for efforts in other industries.

“We need to raise awareness about the larger problem of improperly-granted patents. People in all industries have to pay attention now,” Samuels said.

3D-printed gun site Defense Distributed has obtained a federal license to manufacture and sell firearms, the organization announced Saturday on Facebook.

The site has a mission of making all sorts of 3D-printable objects — including rifle receivers, plastic Glock handguns, bullet casings, and even grenades — more accessible than ever. While the site is certainly controversial, there is something admirable about pushing the limits of what 3D printing can mean. Defense Distributed head Cody Wilson is positioning his organization as the anti-Makerbot because he seems willing to go down the 3D-printing rabbit hole while MakerBot founder Bre Pettis is not.

“When this guy decided that ‘radically open’ meant not so radical, not so open, DEFCAD was born,” Wilson says over an image of Bre Pettis’s face in a recent video (see below).

But now Defense Distributed has taken a major step toward legitimacy with approval by the United States government to manufacture and sell guns. Wilson submitted an application to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in October 2012 to become an official gun maker and dealer. It took about six months for the organization to finally get approval.

Defense Distributed posted a photo of its new federal firearms license on its Facebook page:

While this is a big step, Wilson told Ars Technica recently that he will not start making and selling guns quite yet. He will wait until he gets an “add-on” to his license, which will let Defense Distributed manufacture a broader range of weapons. If approved, the add-on would let the organization manufacture automatic rifles.

Texas-based Defense Distributed has seen a lot of traction in the past few months. Its DEFCAD site has attracted more than 250,000 downloads to date and now has more than 3,000 visitors per hour.

The most recent Defense Distributed video gives an overview of the organization and its upcoming DEFCAD search engine for 3D-printable parts. Take a look below.

Top photo via Defense Distributed/YouTube

Forget printing objects — with its latest invention, MakerBot wants you to scan them.

Unveiled as a prototype at SXSW today, it’s new Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner fills a major hole in MakerBot’s 3D printing ecosystem: Getting the objects you already have in the physical world into the digital one.

“This is sort of like the scene in Tron when they get digitized into the game,” MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis said during the device’s unveiling. “This kind of the washer-dryer combo of 3D printing,” he added.

With the device, owners can not only prototype new objects, but they can also re-create existing ones. The idea isn’t new, but MakerBot says it’s doing 3D scanning in a way that’s easy and accessible, which has been one of the company’s biggest strengths so far.

But like 3D printing, 3D scanning brings with it a whole host of copyright issues, all of which are likely to give manufacturers the vapors. Just because consumers can scan their property, does that mean they should be legally allowed to? In many ways, 3D scanning is the most dangerous technology yet for anyone who makes a living creating widgets. MakerBot may have just opened up a can of worms — not only for others but itself as well.

“Yes, it’s possible for a MakerBot to make a MakerBot,” Pettis said. “But I’m cool with that.”

Photo: Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

When it comes to 3D imaging cameras, such as those used in video games and for 3D printers, your options are kind of limited unless you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on multiple pieces of equipment. This fact alone makes the $1,800-$2,800 Lynx A Camera from Austin-based startup Lynx Laboratories all the more impressive.

“Really, it’s kind of stupid that nobody is making highly sophisticated cameras that can do more than one thing at a time, like with (camera-specific) apps,” Lynx Labs co-creator and CEO Chris Slaughter told me during last night’s startup crawl at SXSW. “We’re looking for the low-hanging fruit for people who want 3D imaging data and offering them a way to actually do something with it.”

The camera records all angles of a non-moving object and then displays it on screen. As you can see in the videos below, the team recorded a guy dressed in an iPhone costume who was sitting on a giant bean bag. Once the image was processed, you could see the dimensions of the costume and bean bag as if you were changing the viewing angle on a video game. In addition to object modeling, the Lynx Camera can also do motion capture (for use in games and animation) and scene modeling and can record for green screens.

The startup, run by six current students at UT Austin, already has a $150,000 funding grant from the university and a patent on the technology. Additionally, the team has raised $82,000 from a Kickstarter campaign that still has another nine days left before closing.

“The market opportunity here is just incredible,” Slaughter said. He explained that the 3D imaging tech alone would be useful for many industries, including healthcare, national defense, game development, shipping, and more.

Slaughter said the cameras can be produced in about two hours. The team currently has about 40 orders from the Kickstarter campaign.

Photo by Tom Cheredar

If you’re trying to understand how existing intellectual property law applies to 3D printing, let me save you some time: It’s a complete mess.

From top to bottom, 3D printing raises more legal questions than it answers. There are lots of companies making 3D printing hardware, even more companies offering online repositories of 3D designs, plenty of services that will print things for you, and almost zero precedent for disputes among them. From a legal standpoint, 3D printing is the Wild West.

While that may sound liberating for such a young industry, it’s also potentially dangerous. There’s a very real chance that the lack of any regulation could be replaced with bad regulation. And that could have some dire effects on the whole industry.

“Copyright precedents are created one case at a time, and eventually they can lead to the accretion of copyright expansion in a way that was never intended,” Public Knowledge attorney Michael Weinberg said.

Bad laws, Weinberg says, emerge out of a basic misunderstanding of how industries work. And for a young technology like 3D printing, misunderstandings are going to be common.

How bad could it get? Consider a law that would force companies like MakerBot and 3D Systems to shell out a percentage of their sales to offset the piracy factor, with the money going into a fund to compensate makers of plastic toys, like Mattel and Disney. Or a law that required 3D services to adopt software that limits the number of times 3D design files (STLs, etc) can be printed or which printers can print them.

For people who are excited about free, unfettered access to 3D printer technology, those are some scary possibilities. But Weinberg is convinced that 3D printers, on the whole, will come out all right.

“These are general-purpose machines, and the companies that make them are fairly well-protected,” he said.

Copying, printing, infringing

Right now there are quite a few sites that act as repositories for 3D designs. MakerBot’s Thingiverse, Shapeways, and i.materialise all invite people to upload their designs and share them with (or sell them to) others.

But once you let people upload their own files, you expose yourself to all of the risks that come with that freedom, such as files that infringe on copyrights. (Consider all of those Yoda figures that Star Wars fans like to put on Thingiverse, for example.)

One 3D-printed interpretation of the Penrose triangle. (Source:Thingiverse)

These sites handle copyright concerns the same way YouTube does: Copyright holders post takedown notices, and the hosting sites, as protected “safe havens” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), cover their butts by taking the infringing files down. Simple enough.

Sometimes the process is a bit more complicated, though. Thingiverse hit a major milestone in February 2011, when it got its very first takedown request. The complaint came from Ulrich Schwanitz, a designer who claimed that a Thingiverse user had uploaded “his” design to the site without his permission. The problem? The design in question was a model of the Penrose Triangle, created in 1934.

Community response to Schwanitz’s claims was, suffice it to say, not glowing (“Ulrich Schwanitz is an ass,” a Thingiverse commenter eloquently quipped), and Schwanitz eventually dropped his infringement claims and donated the design to the public domain.

Another example: Earlier this month, 3DLT, a 3D design marketplace, posted designs on its site without the permission of the design owner. 3DLT eventually blamed the problem on sample listings that went live before they were supposed to, but the damage was already done: 3DLT was forced to give a public apology and reaffirm its commitment to protecting the intellectual property of all designers — not just its own.

“3DLT is committed to providing a consumer-friendly, 3D design marketplace where creative assets are safely protected and designers are properly compensated for their intellectual property,” the company said in a statement to VentureBeat.

But while Thingiverse and 3DLT are already dealing with IP issues, Todd Grimm, president of consulting firm T. A. Grimm & Associates, says that the concerns over 3D printing are, at this point, overstated.

“That future of consumers making their own designs and firing up their personal 3D printers to pirate objects is years, or even decades away,” he said.

Unlike most people who pay attention to 3D printing, Grimm isn’t convinced about the technology’s short-term potential to disrupt, say, the kids toys or spare car parts industries. And neither, he says, are the industries themselves.

“Honestly, most companies may not even be afraid of it. They’re really not thinking of this now,” he said.

The pirates discover 3D printing

Companies may not be paying close attention, but the days when physical objects can be pirated as easily as Weezer songs are coming, and the Pirate Bay is already pushing things along.

A slow start for 3D-printed piracy.

Last year the torrent site launched its “physibles” category, which hosts STL designs that 3D printer users can print out. Right now the category only houses a hundred or so files, and they’re limited to things like gun parts, Guy Fawkes masks, and printable copies of records like Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.” The early days of pirated objects are, well, subdued.

It won’t always be this way, of course, and it’s only a matter of time until the piracy of physical objects will be as common as the piracy of music and movies is today.

How will companies handle this? That depends on how well they adjust to the realities of  IP law.

Public Knowledge’s Michael Weinberg says one of the big challenges for all object industries will be to collectively recognize the realities of intellectual property as it relates to both digital and physical objects. The first step? Realizing that IP law is nowhere near as robust as we think it is.

“People assume that everything they sell is protected by IP, but that’s often not the case with physical things,” Weinberg said.

“Companies are going to have to recognize when they have legit claims and when they won’t — and most of the time, they won’t,” he added.

This is something established industries won’t like to hear, of course and, if history is any indication, most of them will react by firing their legal teams in all directions.

Weinberg, however, hopes that they won’t. The music and movie industries have already shown us what happens when fear drives ligation: Lots of people get sued, lots of money gets spent, and no one really has much to show for it.

Instead of suing the 3D printing industry, smart companies of the future are going to figure out how to profit from it. 

Nike’s sneakers are becoming increasingly high tech, and 3D printing is helping them along.

On Sunday, Nike took the lid of the Vapor Laser Talon, a superlight, 5.6-ounce football cleat created in part with a 3D printer.

Optimized for the 40-yard dash, the Vapor Laser Talon features a 3D-printed base plate optimized to give athletes the ideal drive position as they run, Nike says.

To create the plate, Nike engineers used a 3D printing technique called selective laser sintering, which uses lasers to fuse small particles into 3D shapes. As Nike footwear innovation director Shane Kohatsu notes, the Vapor Laser Talon just wouldn’t be the same shoe if it were designed any other way.

“SLS technology has revolutionized the way we design cleat plates – even beyond football – and gives Nike the capability to create solutions that were not possible within the constraints of traditional manufacturing processes,” he said on the Nike blog.

While a first for Nike, the Vapor Laser Talon is an extension of one of the most obvious uses for 3D printing — rapid prototyping. By using 3D printing, engineers have been able to design and prototype objects at speeds that would have been unheard of years ago.

Sneakers may never be the same. 

Makexyz is a 3D printing service with a brilliantly simple premise: Link the 3D printer owners of the world with the designers that need them. It’s like Airbnb or Wheelz for 3D printers.

“Instead of being printed at some Orwellian factory, our objects are printed by real people,” Makexyz creator Nathan Tone told me by phone.

It’s strange to hear the factories of Shapeways and i.materialise described as “Orwellian” so early in their existence, but Tone’s larger point still stands: Makexyz is a disruptive alternative to the 3D printing service incumbents (if you can even call them that yet).

Tone says he got the idea for the service after designing a light switch, which despite its simplicity took weeks to print. “There’s a big benefit to just printing locally. Objects are half as expensive, and you get them twice as fast,” he said.

Here’s how the service works: You sign up, upload your 3D design, and Makexyz will link them to the hundreds of 3D printer owners who can print their objects.

Tone says that Makexyz can print objects for half as much as services like Shapeways. Most printers charge between  $.25 and $1.50 per cubic centimeter depending on what material customers would like to print in. (Products at Shapeways start at $0.75 per cubic centimeter.)

“We’ve been careful to make sure that our prices are lower than working through a big company,” Tone said.

The price factor is also hugely important for 3D printer owners, who in most cases have spent thousands of dollars on their gear. Makexyz gives them a way to recoup some of their costs in their spare time.

So far, Tone says customers are printing a wide range of objects, including art pieces, product prototypes, and even cases for their Raspberry Pi computers. “The service gives us a clear window into what people are working on,” he said.

Photo: Flickr/Gavin Tapp

DEFCAD is a website for 3D printing of guns. It’s bathed in controversy, but that’s not preventing it from growing.

Since launching in December, DEFCAD has become home to nearly 90 components, including bullet casings, pistol suppressors, and even grenades.

More significant, however, are the traffic numbers. Visitors to DEFCAD have to date downloaded over 250,000 files from the site, creator Defense Distributed announced via Twitter today.

One of the two grenade models hosted by DEFCAD.

DEFCAD gets an average of 3,000 visitors per hour, representing roughly 2TB of traffic since launch, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson said by phone today.

What all this means should be pretty clear: A whole lot of people are interested in downloading (and perhaps printing) guns.

“Obviously, there’s an interest in what we’re doing. Enthusiasts want these files,” Wilson said.

Interest in 3D printed guns isn’t limited to the United States. Wilson said he often gets emails from foreign gun enthusiasts, telling him how much they appreciate what Defense Distributed is trying to do.

“I think a lot of people understand the idea that we’re a bastion of freedom and that we have something in common with information anarchists like Aaron Swartz and WikiLeaks. The bits must be free,” Wilson said.

For others, the interest in DEFCAD stems from a desire to ensure that 3D printed guns becomes a reality.

“DEFCAD is an essential step in advancing the state of the art [of 3D-printed guns]. I know that scares a lot of people, but it’s true,” Wilson said. “We’ve essentially become the go-to gun file site.”

Launching today via Kickstarter is the 3Doodler, a 3D-printing pen that can create solid objects from melted strings of plastic. As with 3D printing as a whole, the 3Doodler works in a way that’s almost magical: You’re actually creating objects out of thin air.

More notable is that the device will retail for roughly $75, which is absurdly cheap in comparison the prices of more full-featured devices like the $2,000 MakerBot Replicator. Obviously, the 3Doodler won’t be able to create the same quality printouts as the Replicator, but for a lot of people, that won’t matter.

Safety, however, is a concern with the 3Doodler. While a pair of toy designers created the device, this isn’t the kind of toy you’d want to give to your kids: The pen’s metal tip can reach temperatures as high as 270 degrees Celsius, which is a burn hazard for just about everyone. This is one case where it’s best to leave the kids to their crayons and paper.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 3Doodler’s $30,000 Kickstarter campaign is already fully funded, and creator WobbleWorks says it’s already working with Chinese factories to manufacture the device.

There might have been a time when I would have been surprised to hear that someone was using 3D printers to make a car. But, well, this is 2013.

The car in this case is the Urbee, a tiny three-wheeled economy car with an electric motor, internal combustion engine, and 3D-printed frame. Designed by the Manitoba-based Kor EcoLogic, the Urbee was manufactured using a Stratasys Fortus printer, which is able to cut down on parts by printing the Urbee in roughly 50 large blocks. 

While prototypes of the Urbee have been around for a few years, it’s only now that the team is finally ready to begin producing the concept with the Urbee 2, Urbee engineer Jim Kor told the Pioneer Press.

Predictably, cost is an early concern the Urbee, though Kor says that the price disadvantage could evaporate as 3D printing technology continues to evolve.

Printing the whole car should take 2,500 hours — or, roughly three months.

That might sound a little futuristic — and utopian or dystopic, depending on which side of the intellectual property debate you stand on — but it’s already happening.

Wired Magazine caught 3DLT, a marketplace for 3D designs, stocking and selling designs for 3D printed objects that it did not own, and did not have the rights to re-sell. 3DLT sells STLs, which are essentially documents in the Standard Tessellation Language which many 3D printers use to create objects. Essentially, they are programs or recipes for building physical things.

The only problem?

The products 3DLT were selling belonged to Nervous System, a “generative design studio” that writes “computer programs … to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.”

3DLT’s website

Oops.

3DLT has since apologized for the snafu, saying that the site is in beta, and the products and images portrayed on the site “were being used as placeholders and were not approved for use.” In addition, while the products shown were unapproved, the actual downloads were not 3D designs but random zip files, which makes the company’s statement fairly credible. (I could not reach CEO Pablo Arellano Jr for comment.)

But the incident does highlight some of the interesting challenges of the future.

What happens to designs when anyone can copy them? Will there be a marketplace for “bootleg” 3D designs that quasi-legal companies operate on the fringes of the law? Will 3D printers have to contain copyright enforcement technology that watches what you do in your home and ensures you only print approved, licensed designs? (And only one of them, unless you pay more.) Will governments force 3D printing companies to install spyware that ensures people don’t print weapons?

The answer to a lot of those questions is yes, and it’s happening already.

The Pirate Bay already has a category for 3D printed objects, what they call “physibles.” People on the cutting edge are making guns, or trying to, with 3D printers. And the fabulous unlimited world of 3D potential is already being limited by legislation.

All of which makes 3DLT’s slogan ever so much more ironic. “Finally, you can get exactly what you want,” the site proclaims on its new buyers page.

Life used to be so simple in the good old days when piracy was simply about movies or software.

Image credit: Nervous System

The unearthing of King Richard III has given 3D printing yet another chance to show just how awesome it is.

The remains, confirmed this week as those of the dead king, were brittle, broken, and hundreds of years old. But using a combination of a 3D scanner and 3D printer, researchers at the University of Dundee were able to reconstruct the dead king’s surprisingly ordinary face.

A not-so-flattering depiction of Richard III.

The reconstruction confirms as much as it debunks about Richard III, who has been historically depicted as a deformed, hideous hunchback. In contrast, the reconstruction depicts a more normal-looking facade, with no sign of abnormalities besides a slight distortion of his shoulders.

To create the model, researchers used stereolithography, an additive manufacturing technique that uses a combination of ultraviolet-reactive liquid resin and ultraviolet light to create solid objects.

After printing the replica, the scientists painted it, added a pair of glass eyes, and topped it off with a wig and fashionable cap.

Researchers plan to eventually loan the reconstruction to the city of Leicester, which will display it at a visitors center it plans to build at — where else? — the site where Richard III’s remains were found. 

Well, perhaps.

Six scientists in the UK and Scotland have successfully printed human stem cells with a “valve-based cell printer” that uses bio-inks to fabricate groups of viable stem cells that retain their ability to become any type of cell in your body.

Stem cells are valued by biological scientists for research because they are “pluripotent:” they can develop into almost anything a human body needs such as skin cells, muscle tissue, or internal organs. But collecting and using them has been a controversial process, as one source for stems cells has been embryonic tissue harvested after abortions. And using them inside the human body has been difficult.

This new process essentially bio-fabricates usable conglomerations of human stem cells by printing bio-ink, made up of a number of organic components including HEK293 (human embryonic kidney) via a valve-based printer with very fine nanoliter capacity (an ounce of liquid contains 29,573,529 nanoliters). The nozzle of the valve-based printer that they used is only .002 inches wide.

Between 70 and 95 percent of the cells survived past 72 hours, and three days after, the cells tested positive for pluripotency, and seemed to be growing:

Essentially, the scientists printed arrays of stem cells that could be used in future in-vitro organ regenerations. Maybe you won’t get a new motor, but you could get an on-site re-build … and surgeons won’t have to take your body apart to do it, either.

Along the same lines, the scientists speculate that “direct in-vivo cell printing for tissue regeneration” will become possible, allowing doctors of the future to heal internal injuries without surgery.

Which is a little bit cooler than 3D printed business cards, no? And better than 3D-printed guns, surely.

photo credits: Tatcher a Hainu via photopin cc, Alan Faulkner-Jones, Sebastian Greenhough, Jason A King, John Gardner, Aidan Courtney, and Wenmiao Shu, Hat tip: ExtremeTech

Imagine you’re at an industry event — say, a check-out-our-new-office party for that trendy startup — and you meet someone who’s just dying to stay in touch with you.

What do you do? Exchange business cards? LOL, sure thing, Grandpa Joe! No one has business cards at this party, and you didn’t want to incite mockery by bringing yours. Ok, how about Bump? Not everyone’s got that app, unfortunately.

Then, the new mystery person plunges her hand into a voluminous purse and hands you a one-inch cube of hard plastic. It’s got some contact information; it looks cute, like something you’d try to move around in a video game.

You eyeball it suspiciously as your new contact gushes about how quirky it is and tells you about CallingCube, the company that makes it. She tells you she got 80 for $300 and isn’t that a better deal than Moo cards, which people just forget and throw away anyway?

You turn it over in your hand. It’s solid green, engraved in black with a phone number and name. As you roll it around in your palm, you also see a simple logo on one of its sides. It reminds you a lot of a die; you start to wonder how you could make a drinking game out of it.

Your new friend says something about how you’re not supposed to get the cube wet and then mills off in someone else’s direction.

You have to admit, the cube is unique. It’s noticeable, and it would stand out in a stack of business cards, for sure. So you go to put it in your…

Purse? Pocket? Where are you gonna put this thing? It’s small, but it’s still too big to go in a wallet. You think again about the person who gave it to you and decide that since you don’t have a concrete reason to stay in touch, the cube will have to be a sad casualty of cocktail party networking. You snap a photograph of the email adress side of the cube and glance around surreptitiously before sliding the cube under a small, crumpled napkin.

A couple months later, you’re cleaning out your phone’s photo gallery. You barely think twice before deleting the picture of the cube.

This post was written by entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa.

Companies all over the world are becoming increasingly worried about their ability to innovate and compete in the fast-changing technology world. That’s according to GE’s third annual “Global Innovation Barometer” released Jan 17.

The survey of 3,100 senior business executives in 25 countries showed the anxiety that these executives feel about innovation and how confused they are about global competitiveness. One in three said the increased competition and accelerated pace of technological advancement is having a negative impact on their local economy. And while 71 percent said they favor the opening of their markets to foreign trade, investment, and technology imports, an equal percentage want protectionist government procurement policies that favor domestic technological development. There was a 53 percent overlap in the people who expressed these two opposing views. Executives from the U.S. were only a little less divided than Indian executives on this issue.

Business executives agree on some things. They agree, for example, that they need to better understand customers and anticipate market evolutions, attract and retain innovative people, and stay ahead of the technology curve.

It’s clear to me from the GE study that companies may have become more fearful of the future. They are really confused about what lies ahead and what they and governments should do.

It has been said countless times, but it still bears repeating: Technologies are advancing at exponential rates in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials. These advances are making it possible for small startups to take on the largest corporations in the world by developing technologies that make established products obsolete. Combinations of exponential technologies can, as I’ve written before, threaten entire industries — as robotics, AI, and 3D printing promise to do to China’s manufacturing industry, as cheap tablet computers will do to the personal computer industry, and as advances in sensors and genomics will do to the medical devices and pharmaceutical industry.

The “disruptive innovation” that Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has long talked about is happening at an ever-increasing pace. Changes that would take many decades in the past are now happening in a fraction of this time. Witness the evolution of mobile telephones and the changes that these have caused to our work habits and family connections. This has had an even greater impact on hundreds of millions of families in the developing world who were cut off from each when they went to cities to work. Over a 10-year period, the number of cellular subscriptions increased from a few million to almost 6 billion — or 87 percent of the world’s population.

Changes in technology are already toppling giants. Look at what happened to digital camera pioneer Kodak. The company went from being a powerhouse in the photography industry to a laggard. Even though a Kodak engineer invented the digital camera in 1975, the company couldn’t adapt its business model fast enough to take advantage of the technology. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. This will be the fate of many of today’s leading companies if they don’t leverage the advancing technologies and evolve their ways of doing business.

They don’t have as much time as they might think.

On a call to discuss the findings of the GE research, I asked the company’s marketing chief, Beth Comstock, why companies don’t have a greater sense of realization about what lies ahead — about the impact exponential technologies will have on their businesses. Comstock agreed that technology change should be a real cause of concern and said, “Perhaps some of the fear that’s coming through is the recognition that it is happening at a faster pace than many of us can comprehend.” She noted that countries such as Saudi Arabia, aware they will run out of resources one day, are spending the most on innovation, and that Israel is “trying to run a different play” — as a “startup nation.”

Every big company that wants to be in business at the end of the decade needs to “run a different play,” as Comstock put it, and they need to disrupt themselves before some startups — coming out of nowhere — do. Instead of trying to raise protectionist barriers, large companies need to build the same types of innovative products and services that the startups would.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations. You can also follow him on Twitter — @wadhwa.

[Editor's note: This story previously appeared on WashingtonPost.com]

If there is one thing Nokia smartphones have in common with 3D printers, it’s that not too many people own them.

Sorry, that was mean. Let’s start again:

Using 3D printers, Nokia wants to give Lumia 820 the greatest gift of all – unhampered customization.

Nokia has released design files for the Lumia 820′s outer casing, so enterprising Lumia owners can tweak the design and print out their own, customized case.

The move not only harkens back to the ancient history of ultra-customizable Nokia phones but to the company’s recently-announced Lumia 620 as well. Nokia, it seems, is banking on the all-too-real possibility that smartphone owners want more control over the way their devices look.

Of course, the big problem with the move is that 3D printers aren’t exactly a mainstream technology yet — and Nokia knows it. “For now, it’s a bleeding-edge technology for bleeding-edge early adopters — which is exactly where Nokia is aiming its 3D printing community efforts,” Nokia community head John Kneeland wrote in a blog post.

For 3D pinter-less Lumia 820 owners interested in the designs, the solution can be found in companies like Shapeways, which will print out your designs and ship them to you.

In all, the move is the latest indication that 3D printing is creeping into the mainstream, even if 3D printers themselves aren’t.

Conservative media personality Glenn Beck is known for a lot of things, but being at the forefront of technology probably isn’t one of them.

Which is why it was such a surprise to see Beck take the time Tuesday to exalt the wonders of 3D printing.

“This is the latest, greatest technology,” Beck said as the MakerBot Replicator 2 hummed beside him.

Perhaps predictably, Beck’s interest in 3D printing extends further than just a “gee-whiz” appreciation for the technology. As he correctly notes, 3D printing has some major applications that stretch far beyond just the creation of tiny plastic trinkets.

“Jobs will come back to America because you’ll be able to make things again,” Beck said.

The entire segment is worth watching, if only because Beck is surprisingly on point and informed throughout it. “This is Napster for physical things,” he shrewdly observes, all the while avoiding much of the bombastic fear-mongering he’s so frequently accused of being the source of.