I don’t recall if I’d previously read about this or not, but I’d not seen it: the Fab@Home additive-process, rapid prototyping device (Link), here shown creating a watch strap. It’s a nice resource site with plenty of information and apparently plenty more to come. I’ve not done much more than skim through the site but it’s a link I’ll be visiting with some regularity.

Besides the device itself, of interest to me both on the Fab@Home site and on the RepRap blog which alerted me to it a couple of days ago (Link) are discussions about 3D fab catalogues. There is a “Printables” library (Link) on the Fab@Home wiki and a new, anticipatory centralized location for RepRap parts (Link) that seems… ambitious. I’ll be very interested to see the first fruits.

Probably goes without saying that I’ve been thinking about just such things for quite some time. Recently I told someone how an immersive 3D catalog might be accomplished (I’ve been grinding on how to do it for years – since I first started modding Quake 3 – but I’ve always run into content theft issues). Maybe they or someone else will get something like it up and running. It’d be a trip to have that weapons warehouse scene from “The Matrix” play out in a virtual world.

{Image source: Fab@Home}