3D Printing for the Everyman

One of the coolest little doodads I stumbled across at CES was Cubify's 3D Home printer "Cube". Looks like they are listing it for about $1300, and for that you get your own mini manufacturing facility at home.  It can create a pretty impressive array of 3D designs, anything you can imagine pretty much up to 5.5” x 5.5” x 5.5”.  





Of course you can design components to make objects much larger than that.  At the show, one of the reps was wearing a chain-mail glove and a fully flexible backpack strap made out of tons of smaller pieces.  I'm imagining loads of practical and entertainment uses for this thing... lose a boardgame piece?  Just remake it.  While you're at it, make up your own board game.  Kids break off a piece of a toy?  Just make another one.


While probably too spendy still for the average consumer today, the trend here is pretty exciting for making small scale physical creation a reality for the average Joe.  I wonder how disruptive this will be to traditional toy industry, when these things get good enough and cheap enough for everyone to have them.  


Here are some other services that offer similar capabilities, mostly via uploading to them for manufacturing (thanks END Games team for pointing these out):

http://www.dimensionprinting.com/ 

http://www.shapeways.com/ 

http://www.ponoko.com/