“No doubt, it’s going to be an important tool for hobbyists and designers, and for assorted applications here and there, but Wired wants to convince us it’s going to be more than that. ”
There, Wagner James Au, the virtual worlds expert and New World Notes blogger, said it: he’s not convinced 3D printing will be Big.
In the discussion thread I asked whether SecondLife, Cloud Party, OpenSim or other open ended environments will be particularly useful in collaborating and designing prototypes for 3D-printing. Or will it just be one of many possibilities to collaborate on 3D designs for printing, and not necessarily the most obvious one?
His answer:
Quite likely, I mentioned that possibility in my book — but those platforms have less than 1M people, and only a small percent of the population actively engages in 3D prototyping.
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via Diigo http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/10/3d-printing-chris-anderson-wired.html#comments