Shapeways
Description
Frank Piller:
"Shapeways] is spinning-out from the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The site can be seen in the lines of Ponoko and other user manufacturing sites allowing users to create and manufacture their own design with a large freedom of design.
The site very neatly incorporates all elements of a good user manufacturing system I outlined some time ago in this blog:
- A 3D model library - An easy-to-operate 3D-design toolkit (well, not at this stage yet) - A flexile manufacturing system producing the users' design (more or less) rapidly
Utilizing a 3D model library, (starting with a lamp and a bowl), consumers can manipulate the structure, look and feel of their own products. Users can twist, mash, and create their own 3D objects which then are being produced within 10-days or less. Shapeways then verifies objects to ensure printability and provides a real-time cost estimate. Within 10 working days, a tangible 3D product will be produced and arrive at the consumer's home globally.
Browsing over the site, it still looks a bit beta, and their Co-Design toolkits is an external Java-based software that demands quite some time to download and install separately. Using it then however was easy (despite some annoying comments that I should create a profile). But it is a start ...
Anyway, Shapeways takes a major step towards the next generation of consumer Co-Creation and mass customization. Consumers without 3D modeling skills can shape, mash, imprint and design their own 3D products at Shapeways.com. Products are produced with a rapid manufacturing system, and in the moment they all still have this white prototyping look." (http://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2008/08/shapeways-launches-consumer-focused-customizable-3d-merchandise-platform.html)