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Thursday, August 22, 2013

3 Dimensions Of Hell

It appears we're going to talk about 3-D printers again. Hey, why not. They're fun, you can make almost anything with them (sometimes drawing controversy in the process), you can angrily refute the notion that you can make almost anything with them, it's still early enough in their lifespan that you can still speculate wildly about what might happen after all the kinks are worked out.

But we haven't yet talked about what happens when the stupid pieces of junk don't freaking work.

When a 2-D printer doesn't work, you get a faded picture, wrong colors, our printer here likes to print stuff all wavy. When a 3-D printer doesn't work, you all of a sudden have abstract art. People working with 3-D printers have created a Flickr group, 'The Art of 3D Print Failure', to not only chronicle the messes, but also to explain what happened and to learn from the failure. Because 3-D printing is really not all that easy. To print a 3-D image, you first have to create one.

Or one can just laugh at what happens when the request is made for a cube. Or a skull. Or Walt Disney.

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