Maybe One Day You Will Be Able To Print Your Own House

I read an interesting article about companies that are working to bring 3D printers, which can create a solid object from three-dimensional plans, into a price range much more affordable for the small business owner or home user. The price will start at around $4995 but this is expected to drop to $1,000 in a few years.
Perhaps if this technology becomes mainstreamed, real estate brokers for new development projects will show their clients 2D Floor Plans and then print out a model of what the house will actually look like.

Technology News
May 6, 2007, 10:03PM
3-D printers that create plastic items coming to homes
By SAUL HANSELL
New York Times

PASADENA, CALIF. — Sometimes a particular piece of plastic is just what you need. You have lost the battery cover to your cell phone, perhaps. Or your daughter needs to have the golden princess doll she saw on television. Now.

In a few years, it will be possible to make these items yourself. You will be able to download three-dimensional plans online, then push Print. Hours later, a solid object will be ready to remove from your printer.

It's not quite the transporter of Star Trek, but it is a step closer.

Three-dimensional printers have been seen in industrial design shops for about a decade. They are used to test part designs for cars, airplanes, and other products before they are sent to manufacturing. Once well over $100,000 each, such machines can now be had for $15,000. In the next two years, prices are expected to fall further, putting the printers in reach of small offices and even corner copy stores.

The next frontier will be the home. One company that wants to be the first to deliver a 3-D printer for consumers is Desktop Factory, started by IdeaLab. The company will start selling its first printer for $4,995 this year.

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years.

"We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model," he said. "The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials."

Others are working on the same idea.

"In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home," said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. "You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?"

Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light, or chemicals.

3D Systems plans to introduce a three-dimensional printer later this year that will sell for $9,900.

"We think we can deliver systems for under $2,000 in three to five years," said Abe Reichental, the company's chief executive. "That will open a market of people who are not just engineers — collectors, hobbyists, interior decorators."

Even at today's prices, uses for 3-D printers are multiplying.

Dental labs are using them to shape crowns and bridges. Doctors print models from CT scans to help plan complex surgery. And the Army Corps of Engineers used the technology to build a topographical map of New Orleans to help plan reconstruction.

Source: Chron.com