Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve got a 3D printer and a little bit of imagination, you can make pretty much anything. While these machines are still too expensive to be completely ubiquitous, early adopters are making some really amazing things. We got a look at a few of these objects at the 3D Printing Expo in New York this week. Here are the most unbelievable items we saw. More »

Designing toys takes sketching and planning and imagining, sure. But what’s even more impressive is the actual making—still a much more industrial and craftsmanlike process than you’d imagine. It requires, essentially, a whole factory condensed into a few rooms of Hasbro’s headquarters outside of Providence, Rhode Island. More »

While there are blind painters who are able to create masterpieces, have you ever wondered about the rest of the blind or visually impaired population and how they appreciate art? Considering that they cannot see, and since most paintings have a “no touching” policy, it would be almost impossible, right? Well looking to change that and allow the blind to enjoy pieces of art just like everyone else, a group of Harvard students have embarked on a project called “Midas Touch”, which essentially takes advantage of 3D printing to allow the blind to “see” pieces of art.

The concept behind Midas Touch is simple – regular flat images, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, are printed in 3D with layers of texture on top of it to help the blind or visually impaired “see”, or rather feel, the art. It should be noted that this is purely theoretical at this point and that the team is currently working on prototypes to prove that their idea has merit. After all, braille has been designed to allow the blind to read, so couldn’t something similar be done for art as well? The team is currently trying overcome some hurdles, one of which involves color, as in how do they translate color into a feeling. Pretty cool stuff and we can’t wait to see where they can take it.

[Image credit – Evgenia Eliseeva]

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3D printing is still a novelty, and it is definitely far from the finished commercial idea that it could very well be. However, this does not mean that there is no hope whatsoever for 3D printing to move beyond the realm of just hobbyists, and here we are with this particularly unique way of taking advantage of 3D printing, thanks to an Autodesk engineer who is known as Evan Atherton, where he has access to a 3D printer that is far more capable (and of course, expensive) 3D printer compared to what the general masses are able to own – which is the Objet Connex 500.

As part of a design exercise, he decided to roll out this unique set of 3D printed speakers that come complete with LumiGeek-powered LEDs, now how about that for class? Of course, this is just a conceptual idea that has been brought to life, and you can be sure that it is not going to be cheap considering how this 3D printed light speakers require $2,000 worth of printed material, in addition to nearly 60 hours worth of man and machine time required to create it.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Samsung HomeSync Could Be Android-Powered Gaming Console, Chinese Engineer Makes Cotton Candy Machine From Old Hard Drives,

Look, you probably don’t have a 3D printer. But if you do and you want to really scare the crap out of your friends you need a humanoid robot head like MAKI, the “emotive robot” that you build with 3D printed parts plus third party tech. More »