The last frontier

Today the package arrived from MakerBot Industries — a new CupCake CNC Deluxe Kit — just $950 plus shipping. The MakerBot business model is very simple: Why ask people to spend $20K on a 3D printer when they can buy a kit for less than $1000 and assemble it on a day or two?

So on a whim I went on-line, clicked two day delivery, and this evening a friend and I started putting it together. We got most of the way through, but then decided to get a good night’s sleep and finish the job in the morning. When it’s done, it will look something like this:

And it will let me make 3D things quite similar to the ones I showed and talked about last week — but at far lower cost.

The cool thing about using one of these — as opposed to the 3D printer I wrote about last week — is that a MakerBot is not just one 3D printer in one place, it’s something far more powerful. Because the price is so low, everyone you are collaborating with can have one of their own.

I can be in NY, a friend can be in California, another can be in London, and each of us can independently print out objects we’re designing together. One of us could run through ten iterations or more in the course of a day, without holding up anyone else or monopolizing resources.

We are already used to this concept when our shared creations are stories, images, songs, movies, computer games, and anything else that can be described (and therefore transmitted) as a sequence of bits.

Now at last this level of creative and collaborative freedom is coming to the last frontier — our physical world itself.