Gadgetory

right now it is we're in the homestretch of CES and I have two of my most favorite people here because they run the companies that make the 3d printers as you might know the two 3d printer companies 3d systems and MakerBot we're finalists in our best of CES Awards MakerBot actually won the emerging tech congratulations thank you very much Bree Pettis here very funny repented here is the CEO of MakerBot and Thingiverse yep Cathy Lowe's here is at three 3d systems and I gotta both hear and we're gonna talk about this incredible technology which is just so cool so first of all I want to ask you guys how do these things work I mean we're both of them but we're having a print off right now I don't know what they're making actually I do you're making Bri is making a cupcake or supposed to be surprised a red velvet cupcake with icing on it I am so hungry good and Cathy here from 3d systems is making one of these yes look at this look how cool this is and you're wearing did you make that there we didn't make it on this machine okay we have a whole series of units that can produce in the cloud yeah anything you want anytime you want now what's cool about this is that this is like mail train yeah that's exactly this plastic mail and all these pieces are interconnected I don't know how else you what makes us aside from well hammering links together like if you were in the medieval times right that's very cool all right how do these things work where's the magic pull the magic yeah so what we've got here is a machine that can make you almost anything and it starts with the raw feedstock we've got it back here you can see it it's ABS plastic this is the same thing Lego is made out of you can all see you as PLA which is made from corn which is pretty cool then it goes through these tubes to the extruder and it prints it out it draws a picture in molten plastic and lifts up a little bit and draws another picture and then layer by layer your object emerges and BAM so I've got something where there was nothing four and we made it he who brought this in this is by though of course negative demerit everybody anybody who doesn't recognize this from portal how long does it take to make something like this this companion cube this is a full-day print this is like a 10 or 11-hour print off so you can't it's not like printing out a resume you get it wrong you go do it again well actually that's exactly what it's like the beauty of having your own 3d printer and is if you if you make it you're like you know I need a bigger you just print it again and then you just there you go you're all set to go okay and Kathy here from 3d systems your system looks a little slicker I say you know that's got the the the laser cut balsa frame this is all plastic what is this one how does this way this one works pretty much the same way at any special differences here effectively they all work the same way 3d printing is about laying down your object whatever it happens to be layer by layer by layer and what we've done simply is say we want to bring a different kind of experience for the consumer market where they don't have to be technical they don't have to build it it's all about sort of a mash-up of iTunes and Facebook where you socialize you trade ideas and designs and then you simply download and print it on your own 3d printer or you ask us to print it for you in the cloud and we can print anything you can design anything you can imagine because we think the consumer experience needs to be coloring books simple so what are people going to be printing with these things I mean so far I see some pretty unusual products but Bri is pointing to a radio to a car yeah which is four colors plus has a motor and electronics so that's not completely printable but talked to me about that car there what's up with it so this is a MakerBot project what you do is you order this and you get the Wii of the tires which are rubber and the batteries and servo and they like seanix and a motor and everything else you print so the body the whole steering section the wheels the tires even the gears are printed and you put it together and you get a it comes with one of those a remote control controller and bam you've got a remote-control car that you made yourself hmm now why not just go to RadioShack and buy one for 25 bucks because you can make this yourself and you think you can actually customize this if you don't like the buggy you can make a V dubbing okay you don't like a V dot van you could make a tank and how do you design these things I mean I suppose with that or with with any of these things if you want to do them you get the plans the files and and how do you modify or create those files yourself so one of the things we're obsessed with we're an open-source machine you can download all the designs for this the schematics all that kind of stuff we share everything and we have a site called Thingiverse where we share all the designs for free and the cool thing about that this project is you can just download this and it's under an open license so you can modify it change it and make it yours the the and that's just really cool like though it means that if you see a doorknob you like on Thingiverse you can change it add your initials to it we upload it and it automatically attributes it to the original user see one of the things we've done on Cuba sicom is create an environment where it's coloring book simplicity total ease of use the customer the consumer just goes online if they see something they like they don't have to particularly put it together they could simply download the file and start printing or they can upload their rockband character and ask us to print it in full-color we'll print it and send it to them over the cloud so we think the consumer really wants something very straightforward and easy to use they're not going to actually want to build something or design something all the time they're gonna want to have access to great content so our content idea is to invite all the apps developers to provide applications to make capturing content very very simple very easy you can customize and personalize based on the apps we have already 6000 artists that are going to come online and share their creations then all you have to do is download the creation and make it yours so I have this idea for my my plan B is is a piece of hardware so I'm not going to tell anybody what it is because it's so stupidly simple that it could be stolen but I need to prototype it yeah so if I prototype on one of these things then what then I want to say I want to print 5000 of them or create 5000 and then they do I just take the exact same plans and send it some factory in China and they make it on a brass or or what you can it really depends on how many you're gonna run we have systems that will actually create the mold for you to go into tooling you can actually use one of our services to create up to five thousand there's sort of a break-even when you get into a certain number you're gonna want to go to real tooling and do the long runs but somewhere less than five thousand or in that vicinity you can actually afford a 3d print them yeah I mean our material is this much this is a kilogram 2.2 pounds it was 50 but this is actually like 42 pound $42 2.2 pounds $42 it's cheap this is heavy like you can make a lot of things with that and but it's slow I mean if I wanted to make a 5,000 widgets and it would take me a while with a big platform like this you might be able to pin 10 or 12 off at a time oh okay okay and I just break them apart yeah okay let's see now I you know I'm poor enough with design as it is that's why we have artists over it seen it could I learn how to do my own 3d designs or and what program do I need to learn or and are there opportunities for better apps you know we believe that the average Zoomer isn't gonna want to learn cat there are a number of affordable cab packages and we happen to own one of them but our idea is to give you coloring book simplicity make sure that you're able to just go and mash up your own design based on what's already there if you do want to create that's another opportunity you can actually upload your design and merchandise it online and we'll help you sell it to others and provide you revenue so you can earn money actually by creating so we don't really care about crayon simplicity we want to teach you how to we want to get you started at the easy level you can use Google Sketchup which is free and easy to use and then you'll get hooked and the next thing you know you're going to be building the next bridge or the next solution to the global challenge what you're seeing here is two different approach it looks like it one for the technic Pratt which is a lot I disagree with that actually no I disagree with that too we need this everyone it comes it out comes off together you put it you get it and take it out the box you can make awesome things for cheap I disagree that's what he needs to do we can help you with that but I will tell you where we're going with this it's customization and personalization and self-expression if you can help someone unleash their creativity imagine how many advocates we're gonna find that can create new content and really revolutionize the way we create product in this country in this world and have fun doing it there's nothing like it right realistically though I mean there are there's two different attitudes during idea which I think it's kind of cool I mean that one cause if my grandmother was into 3d printing that you know for you know what look you know obviously a little bit it looks a little bit rougher even though they do pretty much the same thing all that one does to colors which is cool by the way you get to three colors in any color you know it's funny we got here and with two colors yeah yeah big big upgrade big challenge we've got it running in two colors first thing people ask us is what can I add more colors the cool things about what we do is we make it modular so if you're if you are a tinkerer we made it so that anybody can use it and so it's really simple it's really friendly but if you are tinkerer you can just add on another two extruders and see if you can make it work and then license it back to you yeah is about thirty nine hundred dollars fully assembled and ready to print out of the box okay so this product one of the advantages of this one of course is that it is a few hundred dollars less than that one that's true but your than that one how much is that this is gonna retail for $12.99 okay so $12.99 for a product that most people don't think they it's really fun but do you need it that product that is what the this MakerBot is starts to 1749 okay what the point is when are these products going to be in the more I'm gonna buy one for my kid for Christmas stage which will be maybe 300 bucks something that or less how long how long do we get down to that level well you know the barrier and I think we would agree with this it's not the technology price it's how you're going to use it it's the content it's making know it's the technology price because when I'm looking at a Christmas present I twelve hundred dollars is outside of my budget so how long until this is inside the realistic parent budget you know we're going to we have the there's no technology barrier but we believe as a company and as someone who's been in the industry for 25 years that you have to match up content creativity ease-of-use and an experience that the consumer likes to go with the product that they're going to use in their home and oh by the way provide them with an ability to print without having a printer because remember when they were going to sell us the photographic furnace we're going to have them in our home and then we all went back to Walmart to get our prints done that's what simplicity is all about if it's not simple people going to it so provide the service as well okay go ahead Bri with a MakerBot you can make another 3d printer how much of it can you make you can make all the plastic parts yeah you need some rods you need some motors of Enhancement electronics and you're good to go the riprap project has been around for a while we actually started on this project and people use MakerBot's all the time to make 3d printers for their friends but that's we're really low cost with plastic now and one of the other things here is both of these products are using pretty much the same raw material which is this plastic tubing can you are there other materials that you can use I mean suppose I want to make a ring for my wife and can I can I make something out of brass or something we we did this we make things all the time and if I had one here I'll show you and then we go to a foundry in Manhattan and we give them the plastic object and a few days later they come back and we've got it out of brass or aluminum really and there's actually really high-end 3d printers do you think metal printers or do you just have them in your cloud service printers and we also print mode so you can get to it finish product that's made out of metal but in terms of metal in the home that's probably gonna be a couple of additional days a couple of one additional day yeah okay what else we want to know about these things so yeah hopefully the coolest thing this year is that there's not just one 3d printer company and you know the thing is is 3d printing has been around for a long time but it hasn't been accessible you know we started a couple years coming to see us with our kids now we've got a full-on you know assembled then you can buy and just yet they've got a machine you can just buy your dad and that means that there's a there's a there's and and people are excited people are swarming around these booths and it shows that there's something going on here where consumers want to take control of the things they have in their life and this is really different from a lot of the things here where you know you look at your phone you look at your tablet you look at your TV these things are empowering tools that are going to change the future so there's something going on give me your science-fiction vision this your diamond age vision here so I've made a kitchen one of my knobs breaks I take a knob from another thing I drop it in somewhere and scans it and prints me a copy of it yeah we have 3d copies that when I mean when how how much you know so there's people doing that right now you can use the Kinect which is a it's a it's a Microsoft product that has been hacked to be a scanner it's really easy to use there's some software we've been doing this for a while it's really fun - yeah take a scan of yourself MakerBot it I'm sure you can do that on your your you're doing that as well it's that's really fun and so we're in this kind of flight we're in this time where it's the beginning kind of like when the Apple 2 came out and an industry was born and there's people being like do I really need a 3d printer ask somebody who's got a machine like this if they want if they're enjoying life and they're they're gonna just be like oh my gosh it's so cool what's the weirdest thing you or the most interesting thing you've seen somebody print out so most interesting thing I've seen somebody print out is we've got a guy named miles Lightwood who is doing project shelter which is doing eco eco ecology conservation for hermit crabs printing out hermit crab shells because hermit crabs have a like a housing choice so turns out you can't make you can't make shells in any other way than with a machine like these why not because of the yeah cuz they're not illicit you couldn't mold that okay that's pretty cool the most interesting thing aside from the shoe phone here you know able to print almost anything over the last 25 years we've revolutionized any our hearing aids so that they were more comfortable we've changed the way people straighten their teeth we've seen implants that change the way people live so we've had an amazing impact on humankind and we think that by enabling the consumer to take advantage of this kind of create and make environment this coloring book simplicity we're gonna find creations and creativity we haven't seen before and it's really all about the 3d experience and while not everyone's ready race we think there are a number of people because I think both brie and I would like to take a day off and relax given how much excitement we've created here at CES oh I definitely want one or both of these in my house I don't know why but I do listen Kathy lose from 3d systems thank you so much for coming in Reap Edison CEO of MakerBot and thank you very much for bringing your toys and your toy makers with you where are you guys located for people who are watching this live outside of Charlotte no no I mean in here all the way to Charlotte see the thing no no you don't we're in 3d at home who's 13 345 come see us which is okay and we're just at the door just at the middle of top floor self middle top floor spouts and I don't know where that booth was Hollywood central hub natural hall by the way thank you CES and seeing it we love being a finalist yes congratulations congratulations thank you very much thanks everyone be here thank you we're out thanks we'll see you guys soon you