3D Printing

3D printing has been a hot topic for quite a while now. 3D printers have become cheap enough that many ordinary people can have 3D printers for their personal use. In this article, I would like to point out some very nice applications of 3D printing.

Medicine

3D printing has basically two applications in medicine: Very customized non-organic parts or organic printing.

Printing a human kidney

"Magic Arms" prosthetic

3D printing gives man new face

Other examples

Hearing aids
Bones
Print on wounds

Shoes

I always struggle to find good shoes. Most shoes I try feel uncomfortable, although I have size 42 (which seems to be a very standard size in Germany for males). What if we could go to a store, let them 3D scan our feet and have them automatically adjust a 3D model of a shoe to fit our feet? Then some parts are 3D printed, assembled and a few days later we get a shoe that is customized to our feet and cheap.

continuumfashion.com seems to 3D print shoes with nylon. kobilevidesign.com is another designer who 3D prints shoes.

Toys

Board game figures (e.g. custom chess sets, Monopoly cars, ...)
Model building (e.g. Ship model where people pay A LOT of money for it)
Lego

Teaching

Did you have chemistry in school and learn about atom models / crystalline structures? With 3D printing, it becomes easy to get those models for every student!

Or think about architecture and history. You could show models of ancient cities or buildings in 3D.

Spare parts

Imagine something small breaks. Sometimes very expensive devices that are otherwise fine become useless or at least ugly. Now imagine you could go online, download a 3D model of that part and just print it.

Design

Lamps
Cups

Weapons

Sadly, 3D printing can also be used to produce weapons (source).

However, a 3D-printed pistol has a high chance of not working at all, of hurting the person that created it and of working. So currently, it's quite a gamble. But that might change when the quality of 3D printing improves.