In short – the idea of desktop 3d printing is fascinating. Imagine a world where everyone is able to produce anything at any time. Well, we are not quite there yet, but a review of products which are actually produced, not prototyped using additive digital manufacturing techniques might be useful to establish how far are we from this utopian vision.

Let’s move across scales, starting from the smallest one. Shapeways’ Cufflinks or Ring Poems as well as Silver Twist rings from Nervous Systems are some of the examples of 3d printed jewelry. What’s actually getting printed is a wax mold. The object can then be casten in variety of materials including steel, silver and gold.

Casiuss Lamp and Earth White Lamp by Fluid Forms are the example of larger scale 3d prints. Customers customize Cassius by punching into a virtual torus, while Earth Lamp’s reflects the topology of a terrain that customers choose via Google Earth.

Shapeways have some slightly larger customizable products in their offer as well. One of them is Photoshaper, which allows customers to create reliefs from their own pictures. Another is Fruit Confessions. Most interestingly though, Shapeways recently allowed their shop owners – customers who sell their own designs through Shapeways website – to create their forms out of stainless steel.

MGX by Materialize is a an brand of 3d printed products in range of scales. It starts from Shaman and finishing on One-Shot. Their collection for 2009 is called E-volution (although I doubt that it has anything to do with evolutionary computation). Some of the interesting pieces from there are: Fractal table by Gernot Oberfell, Jan Wertel and Matthias Bär, Ubu/Fugu/Roi by Hani Rashid and Gyroid by Bathsheba Grossman.

Assa Ashuach designed a lamp shade Omni for MGX, but his collaboration with Complex Matters goes into an even larger scale. Complex Matters is an innovative company researching applications of structural optimization procedure developed by Sean Hanna and dr. Siavash H. Mahdavi. I have already wrote about Hanna’s and Mahdavi’s research here. AI Stool and Osteon Chair are both examples of products optimized structurally and tailored specifically for production via SLS. Both designs are available for purchase, but the manufacturing costs are considerably high.

Ammar Eloueini’s CoReFab chair was also meant to be customizable. Using an animation software Ammar Eloueini created a customization procedure in which the overall form of the chair is fixed and the pattern flows over it. The idea is that the customer can say stop pattern flow whenever they like current shape. Unfortunetly, due to high costs again, only one full scale piece was produced to date.

Future Factories by Lionel Theodore Dean is another brand not to be omitted in this summary. Icon, Tuber or Holy Ghost are examples of designs created with usage of Genoform – a Solidworks plug-in developed by Genometri, which can be used for automatic creation of design iterations.

Freedom of Creation offers 3d printed products across various scales, starting from Slimbag – an iPod case – and finishing on Monarch Stools and Trabecula Bench – 180 x 36 x 36 centimeters object priced at 12 500 euros.

A certain barrier of scale, beyond which 3d printing production is not feasible financially, is apparent in the examples above. It might however only be a question of time when cheap, large scale 3d printing technologies such as dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis’ Contour Crafting or Enrico Dini’s D-Shape will enter the market and change the scene entirely.