Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
The latest instalment of Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect is part of the Superstruct project.
Within it, a future iteration of Sven takes a moment on a cruise-gone-wrong to reflect on the history of 3D spam - the flipside of the fabrication revolution. Continue reading “When 3D spam got old”
Devotees of rapid prototyping technologies like the RepRap Project will be pleased to hear that construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is funding research into scaling the technology up so that it can be used to produce concrete structures:
Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.
…
Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis.
I suppose that rapid prototyping technologies are going to be a change of web/Internet/genetic engineering proportions over the next couple of decades, affecting everything and leading to unpredictable social changes.
[story on Physorg][image from jared on flickr]
