Julien Reszka
I went to the 3D Printshow today at the Carousel du Louvre. The show runs Friday and Saturday. I went on the first day and I am still thinking about what I saw.
The range was the thing. I expected plastic prototypes and novelty objects. What I found was a floor split between things that already exist in production and things that are about to.
What was on the floor:
- Titanium brackets printed for aerospace applications, already certified for use in aircraft
- Bone graft scaffolds printed from biocompatible materials for reconstructive surgery
- Food printed in chocolate and sugar, shaped to order in real time
- Running shoes with soles printed to the geometry of a specific person's foot
- Architectural models printed overnight that would have taken a model shop a week
- A full dress printed in nylon, worn by the person who designed it
None of it felt like a demo. The aerospace parts are in planes. The medical scaffolds are in patients. The food printer had a queue.
The part that stuck with me is how much the manufacturing assumption changes. Right now the cost of making one thing and the cost of making ten thousand things are completely different. Tooling, molds, minimum order quantities: all of that assumes you are making the same thing many times. Printing breaks that assumption. The cost of making one and the cost of making ten is almost the same. What that does to small-batch production, custom medical devices, local manufacturing is not fully worked out yet.
I do not know which of these applications will be mainstream in ten years and which will stay niche. But I know that walking through that show felt the same way I imagine it would have felt to walk through an early computer exhibition in 1975. The technology is not finished. The use cases are not obvious yet. But the direction is clear.
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