[SOUND] [MUSIC] Hi, let's talk a bit about 3D printing. As the executive director of the Illinois MakerLab, I give lots of presentations on the topic of 3D printing. I usually like to begin my presentations with this quote from Neil Gershenfeld. He was a professor at MIT and co founder of the Fab Lab, an expert on technology in general and the maker movement, in particular. This is what he said, 20 years from now, we'll have Star Trek replicators that can make anything. I think this quote nicely illustrates the revolutionary potential of 3D printing. Although Professor Gershenfeld's prediction is a bit hard to believe, he's not alone. Over the past three years, Jeffrey Bezos, Jeffrey Immelt and Barack Obama have all identified 3D printing as a revolutionary new technology. In fact, according to several leading media sources, including Wired Magazine, The Economist, and The New York Times. 3D printing will lead us into a New Industrial Revolution and dramatically alter our economy. Thus, this new emerging digital tool has important implications that products are distributed and placed into the market. Let me give you a few examples. 3D printers are currently being used by many firms to make a wide variety of products. Thus, you may already own, or actually use, 3D products without knowing it. Here are a few examples of 3D printing applications. One domain is medical and dental. 3D printing is making rapid progress in the medical and dental fields. Today, for example, in the US, most hearing aids and dental implants are 3D printed. 3D printing is also being used to create affordable prosthetics and a number of new startups are actually exploring 3D printing as a way to print human skin and organs. A second industry that is utilizing 3D printing is the fashion and clothing industry. A recent developments in new materials have made 3D printing of clothing a reality. So fashion designers are finding that 3D printing enables them to create designs that are not possible using traditional manufacturing techniques. So for example, there are now 3D printed dresses, shoes, and even bikinis. In addition, large clothing manufacturers and retailers are also starting to realize the potential of 3D printing. For example, Nike is now 3D printing it's football shoes. A third industry is manufacturing, which is actually a collection of industries. Now, for many years, 3D printers have been used in manufacturing industries to do prototyping. Now, we find that many printers are moving away from prototyping to actual printing of final, finished products by a number of manufacturing firms. Let me give you a few examples. So, Boeing, the airline company, 3D prints a variety of parts for its airplanes. Including structural parts for the wings and also air vents for the inside of the plane. Another example is the thermo Local Motors which we talked about in the other module. They recently printed the world's first 3D printed car or at least the body of the car. Now, that we have some examples, let's provide a form of definition of what 3D printing is. It's actually quite simple. A 3D printer Creates objects by an additive process, using a computer-driven device that reads a digital model. There are actually a variety of different types of printing processes and also a wide variety of materials that can be 3D printed. Including plastics, metals, ceramics, and even chocolate. In fact, just about any hard material that can be softened or any soft material that can be hardened, can be 3D printed. Regardless of the specific processes or type of materials, all 3D printers start with a digital model. This is a digital model of an object that will printed, thus 3D printers are a good example of a new digital marketing tool. Now, 3D printers are actually not new. They've been around for over 30 years. However, until recently, these printers have been very large, about the size of a refrigerator and very expensive about $100,000 or more. However, in the last five years. Both the size of the printers, as well as their costs have dramatically shrunk. Today's 3D printers about the size of a microwave oven or even smaller and can cost as low as a 1000 dollars or even less. Thus they can now sit on your desktop. As a result, this technology is rapidly spreading and becoming democratized and available to consumers. Now, that we've talked a bit about what 3D printing is and what's special about it. I'd like to give you a bit of a tour of our Maker Lab and show you some of the things that we make using our 3D printers. Well, we can make lots of things that are fun, such as this Thor hammer. It's a replica of the hammer that was used in the movie. We can also make things that are practical such as a whistle [SOUND] or a giant version of a whistle. As we talked about earlier, 3D printing allows you to make objects that can't be made with any other traditional manufacturing technology. For example, this chainmail. This was 3D printed just as you see it. Came off a printer and there you have it. There's another way to make this using traditional manufacturing technology. We also have other objects that were made by our students. This is one of my favorite. It's called boost. This is an acoustic iPod speaker, which it can boost the sound of your iPhone or smartphone without having to use electricity or batteries. The main mission of our lab is to engage in teaching and research about digital manufacturing. So for example, we offer classes on 3D design, 3D printing. We also are connecting research projects that we'll talk about shortly. In addition, we also in our lab to students across campus as well as faculty and they often come in and print things that they're using for their jobs or for their lives. Let me show you our first printer. This is early version of the printers in our lab. This is called a MakerBot Cupcake. This was the first edition, the first commercial desktop 3D printer. My son and I, we built this printer in 2010 and it still works. You can see though, it's quite primitive compared to the more advanced printers in our lab. In addition to having a large collection of 3D printers, our lab also has a number of 3D scanners. I'm holding one right now. This is a skin scanner. It costs about $500 US. I'm going to use it to try to scan Grant, our interpretive cameraman. Grant, you're ready? >> I'm ready. Please rotate. Keep going, keep going, perfect. Turn it, keep turning. Almost there, and stop. Now, we just need to process the scan. Quick an easy. All we have to do is, essentially, download this design to our 3D printing software. Put it on one of these SD cards. Put the card in our printer. Turn it on, and we'll have plastic Grant.
