Why we need an open consumer platform for 3D printing apps
Last week, I got back from RAPID + TCT, the 3D printing industry’s biggest annual conference in North America, and I saw the field’s future:
- Big industrial machines printing incredibly complex materials that can’t be manufactured with traditional methods (e.g., lattices, metamaterials)
- Big industrial machines printing lots of stuff at factory scale
- Big industrial machines communicating with each other
Did you catch the theme? Big industrial machines.
That might surprise you if you’ve casually followed 3D printing for the past five or ten years. You probably think that 3D printers look like this:
Not this:
I talked to the Inkbit team who made the industrial printers in the second photo. At their booth, I played with a Jello-like membrane, a 3 cm x 3 cm lattice structure made from a proprietary silicone material that squished and sprung to life when you poked it.
As I held the synthetic pad in my hand, I remarked to myself that I was looking at something genuinely new in human history, a material that, until now, could never have existed because we didn’t have the technology to make it.
Novel and complex materials made by big machines invented by brilliant scientists and engineers for cutting edge users, pushing the envelope of science and engineering. On the expo floor, at the conference sessions, and at the after parties, I was told again and again, that’s the future of 3D printing. Not whatever sub-$1000 toy you bought to print a Batman figurine.
My stubborn response? To pitch every engineer, entrepreneur and salesman I met on the idea of a new sub-$1000 consumer printer.
Opportunity in the 3D printing consumer space
As the professional 3D printing world has consolidated around industrial use cases, a huge gap has formed in the consumer space.
Hobbyist printers like the popular Creality Ender 3 ($179), pictured above, are cheap and fun to get started with, but they quickly jam, print unevenly, and take a lot of tweaking to get mediocre results. Even higher-end consumer-grade printers like the Prusa i3 MK3S+ ($999), used for serious prototyping and batch printing, aren’t “push print and forget it”-type machines. No one has created a mass-market 3D printer that’s as easy to operate as a 2D paper printer.
Building better hardware is the easiest place to start. Make an Ender 3 that doesn’t ship from the factory with a warped bed and a skewed frame, which make so many prints fail. Or for higher-end printers with better quality control, add quality of life features like better connectivity or simple performance enhancements like closures that protect prints from drafts. (The latter is becoming more popular, like on Creality’s new Ender 6.)
The biggest opportunity in 3D printing, however, is in the software.
Whether you’re using a $100 printer or a $100,000 printer, your workflow today is essentially the same: design a 3D model in CAD (or download one), then print it. While this process may suit industrial and professional users just fine, most consumers don’t give two hoots about CAD, downloading models, or even the concept of a 3D model. What they care about is the end result, what they can hold in their hand.
That’s why we need an open consumer platform for 3D printing apps. We need a world in which any React or iOS or Android developer can trivially add 3D printing capabilities to their projects.
Did you beat a really hard boss on level 15 of your phone game? Tap here to print your personalized trophy. Shopping at your hardware store and can’t find that screw you need (or better yet, don’t want to schlepp yourself to the store for a screw)? Click here to print it. Are you in cart checkout about to purchase a watch? Maybe you’d like a customized holder perfectly fitted to your new timepiece.
Video games and e-commerce are obvious examples, but the best part of an open platform is that developers would be unleashed to come up with applications that we can’t even think of today. They will be the software equivalents of Inkbit’s silicone pad demo, something that didn’t exist because we never had a way of producing it.
An open app platform would fundamentally change how we think about 3D printing just as 3D printing changed how we think about manufacturing. Printing doesn’t just have to be an industrial process with one workflow, it can become an infinitely flexible medium for expressing ideas.
Why consumer 3D printing’s moment has arrived
If an open 3D printing app platform is such a no-brainer, why doesn’t it exist yet?
The biggest reason is that there’s no market for it today. Almost no one owns a 3D printer, and with how much tinkering affordable printers require to get decent prints, why would they? But I suspect that the situation will change soon.
A colleague at RAPID + TCT explained to me how 3D printing is rapidly climbing the slope of enlightenment and approaching the plateau of productivity on the Gartner Hype Cycle. For him and most industry professionals, the real productivity gain is in manufacturing high-end materials that can’t be made with any other techniques — and when it comes to industrial uses, the pros are right.
Consumer 3D printing has followed its own hype cycle for the past 15 years. Disillusionment followed premature announcements in the 2010’s about “the fourth Industrial Revolution” and how every home would soon have a Star Trek replicator. What we got instead were toys that could print figurines. Investors got burned, tech media got sad, and the world moved on from what seemed like a fad.
Yet over the past 10 years, there have been many significant developments in the consumer space that have gone under the radar. Open source designs like Core-XY have drastically improved print speeds and reliability. Cutting-edge nozzles can print with super-strong carbon fiber filaments — indeed, carbon fiber, glass, metal, ceramic, wood, and other exotic filaments are available where previously we only had flimsy PLA or toxic ABS. OctoPrint and RepRap firmware have totally changed printing workflows. And some of Stratasys’ (the IBM of 3D printing) key patents, such as heated build chambers, have expired, making it possible to build printers that use advanced materials like polycarbonate or PEEK.
Hobbyists have already leveraged these developments for real world business cases. There’s a whole cottage industry on Etsy, for example, of entrepreneurs printing figurines, home goods and jewelry 24/7 using completely automated workflows with almost no downtime. YouTubers describe side hustles making carbon fiber automotive parts for local repair shops that go into real, actual cars on the road. An army of heavily-modded Enders, Prusas, and other hobbyist machines profitably powers all of this printing.
These developments have convinced me that within the moment for consumer 3D printing has arrived. The whole space feels like computing in the late 70’s with Wozniaks stitching together off-the-shelf parts in their garages. The technology is finally here, what we need is a Jobs to integrate and polish their efforts and ship the Apple II.
What made the Apple II so powerful was the consumer-oriented software that could run on it, like VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet and killer app. I don’t know what consumer 3D printing’s killer app will be, but I know that in order to build it, we need an open platform. That platform will be built around consumer hardware, not industrial machines, by whoever can integrate it into a cheap, reliable, and appealing mass-market device.
All the pieces are laying around the garage. Let’s build it and ship it 🚀.
I’m building a consumer 3D printing startup, and I can’t do it on my own! I’m looking for a co-founder and a community of enthusiastic engineers, designers, marketers, and 3D printing advocates.
Does the vision in this article resonate with you? I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me an email at me@ersinakinci.com.
