Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
You could edit the table's design ile, then 3D print out a new version of the
table. However, unless you printed the new table in billions of tiny voxels, the
new table would be analog. Its materials, its parts and pieces, would remain
innate, unintelligent, continuous, and passive. If you could 3D print the new
table in voxels, however, a world of new possibilities would emerge.
As electronic components continue to shrink in size and increase in com-
puting power, someday we will be able to 3D print voxels containing tiny
circuits. Like graphic pixels whose perfect merged union creates a beautiful,
high-resolution digital image, a perfect union of voxels would create intelligent,
three-dimensional active physical objects.
Voxels give birth to intelligent and active raw materials. Instead of 3D print-
ing passive parts as we do today, in the future, we will print active systems,
for example, a working cell phone. 3D printers would create smart fabric,
ready-made robot life forms, and machines that learn, respond, and think.
We will print physical things that contain the intelligence of digital things.
Someday 3D printing will bring artiicial intelligence from the computer
into the real world. Robots are old hat. Cyborgs are a cultural relic from the
1990s. The future lies in programmable matter, raw materials whose behavior
we can program and 3D print in a chosen shape.
MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld, in his topic
When Things Start to Think
,
predicted that programmable matter will contain a mind of its own.
1
When
things start to think, digital processing power will literally ind legs and walk
into the physical world. 3D printed programmable materials will form their
own physical body, complete with mechanical and tactile capacities.
Perhaps one day, 3D printed robotic life forms will emerge from the printer
complete with batteries, sensors, and circuit-brain already inside. New-born
3D printed robots will take their irst hesitant baby steps out of the print bed
and put their electronic circuitry to work learning their way around. Perhaps
someday 3D printed robots will return to their 3D printer to invent new fea-
tures for their “birth machine,” for a health check, to recalibrate or replace
printed parts.
Faxing things
The ultimate convergence will arrive when we effortlessly shape-shift between
being physical and being virtual, when physical objects smoothly transition
from bits to atoms and atoms to bits. In the same way an online document can
be printed on paper, scanned, and then printed again, someday physical things
will migrate between bits and atoms and back again.
