It is now more than 20 years since 3D pioneer Chuck Hull invented the stereolithography process and started the now billion dollar rapid prototyping industry. Over the following two decades, layer manufacturing processes have evolved from simple prototyping systems into fully validated shop-floor production technologies. Yet over the same 20-year period, we have seen a far more profound technological change in the way we buy products, rather than in the way they are made. The most notable change is the use of the Internet, which has revolutionized the way we find, order, pay-for, and even track products for delivery to our homes. Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of interactive web sites that enable us to engage in the actual product design process by allowing us to up-load our own images and designs and order customized and personalized products from business cards and coffee cups to T-shirts, shoes and calendars. It was only a matter of time until these two technologies would come together, giving the consumer the ability to not only design over the internet, but also to realize their own 3D products on-line using direct-digital manufacturing (DDM).

Probably the earliest example of using DDM to enable the manufacture of online content was the launch of www.fabjectory.com by Mike Buckbee in 2006. The Fabjectory business model enables players from Metaverse’s online 3D virtual world Second Life to purchase models of individualized avatar characters manufactured using Z Corp> (www.zcorp.com; Burlington, MA) 3D Printing (3DP). Unlike other massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPG’s, the creators of Second Life assigned all intellectual property rights for characters to the game’s users, a loophole exploited by Fabjectory, without any infringement of the game’s intellectual property.

A similar application of Z Corp.’s 3DP to Fabjectory was launched in December 2007 by FigurePrints (www.figureprints.com). However, the FigurePrints business model is quite different from Fabjectory. FigurePrints is an exclusive licensing partnership between a former Microsoft executive, Ed Fries, and global software house Blizzard entertainment.  The FigurePrints Web site allows players of the MMORPG World-of-Warcraft (WoW) to order scale models of their online gaming characters manufactured using 3DP. However, unlike Second Life, where the character IP resides with the designer, all WoW character definitions remain the exclusive intellectual property of Blizzard entertainment, although they are designed on-line using a suite of “character building tools” by the game’s players.

A similar closed-loop rapid manufacturing (RM) fulfillment model to FigurePrints has been developed by the 3D Outlook Corp., where web users are able to select topographic data of the earth’s surface using an internet based design tool (www.landprints.com) and use this as the basis for a 3-dimensions color relief map.

Another web-based RM fulfillment business has also been launched in Singapore by Genometri PTE Ltd, a spin-off company from the national university of Singapore. www.jujups.com is a 3D portal that allows web users to design a range of “giftware” products such as photo frames, key fobs and tokens, which are then 3D printed to order. Using a series of simple web-based design tools, users have the ability to select from a pallet of 3D objects, which can be personalized with text, relief objects such as flowers or with photo images uploaded by the user. Unlike other on-line DDM sites, Genometri has gone one step further and allows the physical part to be manufactured on a 3DP machine closest to the customer. Hence, a Jujups order placed in the UK across the Internet will be printed in the UK for dispatch.

Using this principle of distributed DDM, UK-based Per-Snickety (www.per-snickety.com) has developed a globally distributed 3DP fulfillment service for games companies, whereby the latent capacity of literally hundreds of color 3D Printing machines are networked together to provide a truly global virtual factory.  Per-Snickety has already demonstrated the concept with a range of different on-line user design-oriented computer games and MMORPG’s. By early 2009 Per-Snickety expects to have developed the capacity to print literally millions of models per annum.

However, globally distributed DDM may be a short lived phenomenon if home-based additive technologies become a commercial reality. Pasadena-based Desktop Factory (www.desktopfactory.com) is tantalizingly close to launching a sub-$5,000 polymeric based additive technology that will be in offices in 2009 and could be in homes as early as 2010.