www.azom.com: Stratasys Ltd., a manufacturer of 3D printers and materials for personal use, prototyping, and production, today announced that Hyphen, the in-house rapid prototyping center of Christie Digital Systems, is utilising Stratasys 3D printing to rigorously test commercial digital projectors and explore new industries and applications.
3 comments:
I know from my own building experience that trying things out and then going back and fixing problems always gets a better product at the end. Often this is something that we would love to do but it's impossible because testing things out takes a lot of time and we just don't have the time to rebuild after we find the problems. Engineering has always had this problem because of the complex interconnections of the products. When building a part for a larger system you need to be sure that your part will do just what you think it will and nothing unexpected so that when the large system doesn't work you don't have to look at each and every part along the way. The rapid prototyping tools that this article talks about help this company to do this sort of testing very fast and fix all the bugs. I think that we might be able to learn from this sort of in house prototyping and testing in theatre. For example what if we were able to make 10 versions of a prop with small changes. Then stress test each of them to find the best quality. That way when the actor uses that prop on stage for hundreds of performances we can be sure that it will work exactly the right way every time.
I agree. These products make it easier to make mistakes and still move forward. The idea of rapid prototyping is certainly the future. I can say that as a student, I find myself knowing the right way to do a project just as I finish doing it the wrong way sometimes. These 3D printers and laser cutters have certainly simplified the fabrication process. The question that it consistently raises in my mind is at what cost. In many cases the expectation would be that conceptual frameworks would strengthen with the added simplicity in the fabrication process, but this is at times not the case.
Rapid prototyping with 3D printers is definitely the way of the future. First it was digital simulations that helped improve the design/engineering process, and now the next logical step is the ability to try something out and go back and fix it. I know I definitely had times where I wish I could've had more time to fix the little things on projects. Take that feeling and apply it to fields where you have to test everything and fix it (ie Medicine, Planes, Space Shuttles, etc...) and that is a lot of time saved!
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