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
Attention, 3D design wonks and other makers of the future! Remember us mentioning the launch of Shapeways, the on-demand 3D fabrication service?
Well, Shapeways themselves noticed the story, and they figured that maybe some Futurismic readers would like to get in on the ground floor with the Beta version of the service; so there are 150 invites waiting to be used, first come first served.
And if you’re thinking “but I’m not a 3D designer”, don’t let that stop you. Maybe you’ve got a World Of Warcraft character you could get printed out, or a Second Life avatar? Or you could take the opportunity to try out with modelling – log yourself into SketchUp and see what you come up with.
But whatever your motive, move fast – 150 invites only! Click through to the Shapeways Beta login page and use the passcode: FuturBETA
And if you get something cool printed out, make sure to let us know, and we’ll publish a picture here on Futurismic if you want to share. Enjoy!
[ Edit – yeah, it initially said 250 codes, not 150. Sorry about that – entirely my fault, but there were only ever 150. Which makes ’em all the more precious, no? ]
Via Jamais Cascio and BoingBoing comes word of the beta launch of Shapeways, a Philips spin-off company that specialises in on-demand fabrication services. In other words, they’re like a LuLu for 3D objects: you design ’em and email the files, they’ll “print” them out. Go check out their blog if you’re interested in seeing the machinery they use.
Fabbing is a great science fiction trope, because it has the potential to be used in both good and bad ways. For the good, companies would only ever need make as many of something as they could actually sell, leaving less for the landfills.
But here’s a flipside scenario for you: let’s say a marketing outfit manages to scrape the electoral register for names and addresses, feeds the resulting database into a service like Shapeways and instructs it to ship some dumb gimmick to every home on the list?
3D spam, folks. You heard it here first*.
[ * Well, I imagine Bruce Sterling beat me to it more than a few years back, and I’ll bet Sven Johnson has mentioned it more than once, not to mention countless others. “On the shoulders of giants”, and all that… ]
[image by oskay; object pictured actually made by CandyFab, a 3D printer that specialises in printing edible confections but which can work with other materials too.]
A new month means a new story here at Futurismic … and this one has got everything.
Seriously – geek hackers and classic arcade games, electronic Darwinism and domestic espionage, venture capital and Valley-esque start-ups … and a healthy dose of intellectual property panic. Leonard Richardson‘s Futurismic début is quite a piece of work!
I should also point out for the benefit of the easily-offended that there’s a generous sprinkling of profanity in “Mallory”, right from the outset. Still keen? Good – you won’t regret it! Click on through and read the whole thing … and please leave comments for Leonard to let him know what you thought of the story.
Vijay had been playing video games his whole life, but he’d never really become addicted to one until the first incarnation of Fuck Me. Adding an element of real-time strategy to the already-frenetic Gestalt Warrior combined construction, emergent behavior, and blob-themed violence in a way that both Vijay and the Selfish GAME found satisfying.
When Bruce Sterling spots something and considers it worthy of note, you can assume he knows what he’s on about – especially if it’s connected to his spimes idea.
But it doesn’t take a genius to see the huge disruptive potential of the "personal manufacturing network" business model behind Ponoko. I’ll simply quote their site, because I couldn’t put it more succinctly than this:
"Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.
The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites."
Poke around the site, and think about it. One of the few things I’ve seen recently where the tired cliche "this could change everything" really does apply.