I first heard about 3D printing in The Economist a while back and it sounded promising but looked like one of those technologies that are always on the horizon but never quite arrive. Recently, someone on QT3 got a hold on a 3D printer and posted a Youtube video of it in operation. It really rammed home how far the technology has come already. Here’s the video he posted, which is just a simple demonstration of what it looks like in action:

Note that this thing isn’t really self-replicating yet. It can apparently print about half of the parts needed to make a new printer, but the metallic parts, motors and other electronic parts need to be purchased separately and attached to the ABS plastic parts that the printer creates. This is the same kind of plastic that Lego uses for its bricks, so it should be quite sturdy.

Naturally, as a boardgame player my first thought was how awesome this would be as a way to quickly create all sorts of pieces for games. This isn’t quite perfect yet because the printer’s resolution is too low, so it can’t do fine detail. Plus the way that the plastic is applied layer by layer makes it difficult or impossible to create pieces with significant “overhang”, as would be needed in for example, a theoretical humanoid figurine with arms that extend past the torso and the feet at the base of the figure. I hear that they’re working on this problem and thinking about ways to add a second print head that would print laterally in conjunction with the original printer head that works horizontally to alleviate this problem. Here’s an example of a different type of 3D printer making a pawn Chess piece:

Still, all this is pretty exciting stuff and it’s as close to the matter replication technology of Star Trek as I can imagine, something I never thought would happen within my lifetime. Hurray for science and technology!