Colin McEnroe Show: Welcome To The Printed World

What is 3-D printing? One of our guests today, Michael Weinberg explained it better than I could:

"Essentially, a 3D printer is a machine that can turn a blueprint into a physical object. Feed it a design for a wrench, and it produces a physical, working wrench. Scan a coffee mug with a 3-D scanner, send the file to the printer, and produce thousands of identical mugs."

We know about these from science fiction. The thing is, they're already here. It may be a little bit too early to say this for sure, but there's a pretty good chance that 3-D printing -- or whatever you want to call it -- could completely change the way we obtain what we need or want, could change the way we live.

There are a lot of ifs and buts that go along with that statement, but none of them change the basic reality: people right now are shooting designs from their computers into machines that just make the designed object.

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