The Tartan Online: Piecemaker, a 3–D printing startup created by Carnegie Mellon master’s student in mechanical engineering Arden Rosenblatt and master’s student in electrical and computer engineering Alejandro Sklar, announced their partnership with retail giant Toys “R” Us at a launch party this Thursday.
Piecemaker brings 3–D printers to retailers and allows customers to design custom pieces on touchscreen kiosks — ranging from small plastic toys to pendants — and watch them be printed in the store.
4 comments:
This looks like a really cute idea, that will probably be quite profitable around the holidays as people look to create personalized presents. I would like to know how they changed or modified the design software so that it can be used by your average layperson, and from a kiosk at that. It seems like we are getting closer to the day when most households have a 3D printer in their house, just like many families now have a 2D printer.
This is a brilliant approach to the never ending 3D printer business question. It seems as if most entrepreuneur style endeavors that try to take on the power of 3D printing try to take in way too much all at once, in an effort to show how great the technology is and to alleviate public questions about exactly what 3D printing is. Instead, it seems as if Piecemaker is starting small and taking on a small bit of the market that a lot of larger tech firms are ignoring in order to gain the capital to soon expand to larger markets such as the public.
This could be a great idea, if done right.
The first problem I see is linear time. From my experience 3D printing, it takes a long time to make anything, the printers can be pretty slow, and I have yet to meet any 5 year old that will sit still and wait for a pendant for 30 minutes.
Also, as Cathy said, 3D printers are not super easy to use. I am sure that the team at CMU is taking time to figure out how the machine would interface with the average consumer at Toys R Us.
Overall I think that this is a terrific way to introduce the upcoming generations to the 3D printing technology. In the future I would love to see a take-home edition, kind of like an easy bake oven, for the kids to learn and experiment with the machines for themselves.
I can only imagine what sort of structures a 5 year old is able to create when manufacturing and tooling problems are removed.
This is an interesting concept. I think David is right, there could be a time issue in that it currently takes a while to 3D print anything correctly, and young children are not patient. This could be a good tool for a child's imagination, but is also has to be child friendly. I wonder how they will continue to work on making this easy to use for people of young ages. Another thing I wonder about is how much the product will grow and change bow that it has partnered with such a large corporation. Partnering with a big business is a big deal, and can make inventions much more profitable. However, you also lose a lot of your independence. In some ways, you can become bound to the desires of the corporation for your product.
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