so okay, well then i'll start. so thank you very much forjoining us today, we certainly appreciate that. my name is simon floyd,i'm with microsoft and i lead our product developmentpractice at microsoft.
3d printing jobs san francisco, we're focused in on solutionsand product development, specifically. and today we're gonna be talkingto you about the impact of 3d printing in industry.
and we've got a really goodmix of knowledge to share with you today and hope thatyou'll find it very valuable. and we'll also have anopportunity to be interactive so it won't be so much of usjust talking to you, but also an opportunity for you toask your questions as you go. i couldn't do it withoutthe help of my friends. so up on stage today i have mygood friends starting kind of left to right, so michele fromtech-clarity, and i have jeff from siemons plm, andi have luis from hp, and i'll
allow each of them to introducethemselves just very quickly. so, over to you. >> hey,everyone i'm michelle boucher. i'm vice president ofengineering software research at tech-clarity. we're an industry analyst firmso we look at best practices and product development and more profitable ways ofbringing products to market. >> hello, i'm jeff walker,
i'm the director ofsolid edge products for siemens plm software. my job is to manage a team ofdevelopers to develop solid answers to the 3d cad productthat is sold into the small and mid-size business markets. >> hello my name isluis i work for hp, the hardware part ofthe house after the split. and we've been working on thenew technology for 3d printing, which we'll go overa little bit, and my actual
role is related to manageall the software related and the partnerships around3d printing for hp. >> very good. i'm gonna kick things off, sowe're not too uncomfortable, i'll ask you to take a seat ifyou like rather than hang out up here, oryou can stay there if you wish, and then we'll getthings kicked off. so first of all, i just wanted to quick recapof why you're here today.
hopefully, this descriptionattracted you to come in or you saw the words3d printing and thought this wouldbe interesting. so, today what we are going totalk to you about, of course, is some of the advancementsmicrosoft is working on together with our partners,of course, in this space. some of this might benew to you, and so that's something that i wasgoing to ask very quickly. just a quick show of handsif you care to reveal so.
but how many peopleare familiar with 3d printing? this is really good,okay, excellent. with that in mind, then we'llskip what is 3d printing and we can go just further into whatit is that we're doing in this particular space and over the course of the nextsort of hour or so. then we'll show you somedemonstrations of how it works, we'll talk about the technologyunderneath, and then, of course, its application and michellewill guide us through some good
big questions so that we canhelp reveal a little bit more about what's happeningin industry today. okay, so this is gonnabe our basic structure. so i'm gonna take you througha quick introduction and luis will take youthrough what is 3mf, which is our consortium for3d manufacturing. so it's three dimensionalin actual format. and then i'll come back andtalk to you about how it's facilitated inside of windows,how to take advantage of it
with different applications,a very short demonstration for you of how that works, andthen a panel discussion. okay, so with that, actually i'mgonna take a seat and, luis, i'm gonna bring youover here to present. >> all right,perfect, thank you. this all started as a dinnerin barcelona, spain, that's how the bigdecisions are made, right? so i'm actually basedin barcelona, spain. that's where hp has one ofthe major r & d centers for
print head technologies andproduct development for different businesses. and, remember,it was the end of december 2014, when we had a visit from somefolks from microsoft about this new file format thatthey're putting together. and they had the file defineda few years before, but they really wanted to take an openapproach and have an industry collaboration to cometogether with a new standard that would replace what'sout there for 3d printing.
so, we got togetherwith a handful of other companies from differentparts of the industries, and the actual first public releaseof the spec was last year, so it's been around forabout a year now. i'm gonna walk you throughwhy that happened, and what it means for the industry, and what are thefeatures that are being enabled. so the first questionis why a new format? so actually did a survey, thereare like 300 different 3d file
formats out there for differentpurposes, but none of them, really, are actuallyspecific for 3d printing. so, the de factostandard is really stl, which stands forstereolithography format. it was invented bythe same inventor of the sla technologyback in the 1980s. and it's prettymuch like bon jovi, he hasn't change muchover the last 30 years. >> [laugh]>> so,
a lot of the new featuresthat the [laugh] the device can do cannot bedescribed in that file format. it was very useful when in the1980s it was simple to use, but now it just didn't scale. there's also very well-known cadformats that are based on erps, which is a way to describecurves mathematically. that has a higherbarrier to entry and to understand, there's quitea lot of math behind it. and it's not very well suitablefor organic or microstructures,
which is some of the thingsyou can do with 3d printing, like you see therein the picture. then people have been using alsorendering formats like vrml or objs to capture color andtexture information that you can do with some devices, but theylack a lot of the capabilities. at the same time there's a lotof information about lightning and other stuff thatit's not really needed. so we sat together, said let's just create a newone that is specifically for
the purposes of 3d printing, andwith that objective in mind. so we put togethera group of folks here to work together to define a newfile format that is really supposed to coverthe entire workflow. so you can think of a designerhere that has a local 3d printer, and a way to exchangedata between the device and the pc is using 3mf. in fact, sam was gonna show us ademo of how that can be done in windows.
if you happen that you don'thave a local printer installed, you can send that toa third party, or what they call service bureaus,that have many machines. and then you can send thatto different portals, and then there's a guywho takes the file, who does some file preparations. he loads them into the machine,and he prints it and sends the part back to you. so there is,at every single step,
you can actually cover itwith 3mf capabilities. the same thing for big enterprises who run aninternal shop to produce parts, so they can use 3mf all the way. and as i said, alsoprofessional service bureaus, actually final end-to-endmanufacturing solutions. so the vision is very ambitious,we're just getting started. hopefully, we'll be able to comeback here in a few years and show how that has beenactually implemented and
practiced in a real world, okay? so as i said, the whole ecosystem about itwas to have one single format from design to print withno loss of information. and it's an industry-backedconsortium. i think we got rid of the slidewith the names of the companies, but there's some copyrightthings that we're not supposed to show the logos [laugh]without authorization. but the point is that we reallywanted to have a really good
cross-section ofthe entire industry. so that's kindarepresented here. so we have some hardwaremanufacturers of 3d printing. so that's hp, stratsys, 3d systems, automaker,they're all there. slm also for metals. on the softer cad side, we havesiemens, we have autodesk, we have dassault solidworks. and then there's also some
operating systems like microsoftwho's trying to build a pipeline from the cad softwareto the devices. companies also like materialise. and we thought it was reallyimportant to have end users in the conversation to make sure wewere solving the right problem. so we invited people like ge,fit, which is a big service bureau in germany, shapeways, and a couple of others. so in the end we have a groupof 14 founding members. and we sit together every weekto define what this format looks
like. the format is open,it's free to use. you can download the specs forfree at 3mf.io. windows, actually, since windowsstand] comes with a native support for that, simon's gonnashow a little bit of that. and there are apis to read andwrite to it. there's some openfirst code out there. we're working on severalextensions to enable all these different functionalities.
so the basic specs justcovers basic geometry. we've defined an extension forcolor, there's an extension for textures and for all this otherthings that we wanna print. in essence, what it means for3d printing users is that for desktop you're starting to geta print experience similar to 2d printing. so if you go backagain 30 years, you really have to knowa bit how to program so you can get the data from yourapplication to the device.
and it was not consistent and there was severalsteps in the process. and today you don't even thinkabout it just to file print and it just goes and it's whatyou see is what you get. so that's the kind of work forthe you will get in the, for desktop users. a lot of the file fixing andmanagement that's kinda hidden in the operating system, sothey're taking care for you. and if you don't have a machineyou can send to service
users and there's a lot ofthings about file formats and take that information ina more efficient way. again, from professional andthe industrial users, it is pretty much the same. so you can- there's someadvanced features that allow you to createassemblies of multiple parts. there's open extensions, privateextensions you can create to do traceability, parities andsecurity and all these things. and we'll talk aboutthat in a little while.
i think, yeah, that was it. so now, the fun part wasto see it in action so. >> yeah. fantastic. okay so, we'll talk a little bitabout health inside of windows in particular and just to helpsort of set the stage for you or paint a picture. one of the things that we'vedone independent health format of course is work onplug and play the printers.
so, what you heard beforefrom louis was perfect there. as he said we want to makeit just like 2d printing. it should be as easyas 2d printing. and it's getting much closerbecause we're doing a few things in the operating system to makethat experience very seamless. so that you plug your printer infrom one of these manufacturers that you see, and then it'sset up and it's ready to go. but also, it's recognized by the applications inthe operating system as well,
so that everything isaware of each other. you don't have extrasteps that are required, that would normally happen inanother operating system or would even happenback in windows 7. so, you would have a lotof extra steps and it would be somewhatfraught with difficulty. so one,we've made that very easy. two, we have an application for printing that comeswith windows.
and we try to make thatvery user friendly, it's touch-centric,you can use with a keyboard and mouse and so forth. so just trying to make it aseasy as we possibly can by not bombarding you with too manyextra things that you have to learn just becauseyou want to print. that was one of the simplethings we wanted to accomplish. something else i'm gonna showyou in demo is integrated technology we have tohelp with printing so
with 3d sometimes they'renot printable when they come from the head system orthey come from game or anywhere else you're trying toprint so we fix those i'll show you in the demo in the samewith but happens you don't the printer we'll try tosolve that for you as well. okay, so what does it look like? well, around about a year ago,almost exactly a year ago, we were at hannover messein hannover in germany and we had a big display there.
and one of the things we wantedto show is how this 3d printing works in particular. and i'm really excited to havejeff with us actually because he was very instrumentalin helping us get solid edge installedonto the computers. and then we were doinga very simple design. we're going from [inaudible]system directly to print. and to show off a little bit wethought that we would do this on a surface pro 3.
we would connect two monitorsto it and we'd have two 3-d printers and we'd be runningthem all at the same time. because, why not. if you're gonna show something you may as well showeverything you can do. and it worked really well. these are just smallconsumer-grade printers under $1,000, and we ran them. we really did run them 24/7just over the 5-day period of
the conference andcreated lots of parts. they were very popularwith the people cuz they wanted a memento. [laugh] but it was also verypopular with the people because they've been experimenting,either at home or at work. and definitely we see a lot morefocus on people taking it to work than i do ibring git to home. so that's just gives youan idea what it actually looks like when you put it alltogether or what's possible.
now, an intriguing thing aboutmaking service that's inside of windows is that it'savailable to any application. and i know in this audienceyou may not be too keen on going deep into the developerexperience, but i did wanna just explain it to you in the termsof what you might understand, which is the possibilitiesthat come forward from partner companies, andmaybe even some of yourselves that wanna create applicationsthat can do 3d printing. and what i think is reallyexciting about this is if
you have an application likeminecraft, as an example, so it's a really good kid's game,for some adults as well. and you'd like toenable 3d printing. that's a very simple task todo with windows, because we've created the underpinningsto make that possible. so you can go from your big, rich castle which you built inminecraft out to 3d print and it should be a simpleexperience for you it shouldn't be difficult andthis will be true actually for
any application on windowsthat has 3d on its per twine. so then that makes it easy forus to enable 3d printing we do all of the hard workwhich you would want so that you can just getto the capability and bring it to your financialuses or your customers. now for the fun part is, i'mgoing to drop over to a demo. so i'm going to have to dropout of the slide deck here for a moment anddrop over into the application. so i'm going to takeyou through more or
less an end to end scenario,so not completely end to end. i'm going to skip the cadapplication in this one instance. i'm just going straight tothe print experience for you. and i'm going to show you, sortof, in real time how this works, to give you an ideaof the experience. so first of all, i'm gonnabegin with something i'm familiar with, which comes outof our own hardware group, so this is part of an xbox
controller in the xbox 360generation, or thereabouts. and i'm loading it up, now the first thing you'llnotice is it's looking for units, so it wants to knowhow i'm going to print it. and being from thatpart of the world, metric makes sort of sense. so, i'm gonna say i'veprinted metric today. now, looking up on screen, there's something thatyou'll see there.
it's actually flagged,the part, and said there's somethingwrong with the part. in fact, it says that it'sjust not well defined. it means we can't print it. which is a commonproblem in 3d printing. so i'm going to repair it,and it's gonna do it for you. and something i think isreally very fun is that this is built in tothe core of windows, so we didn't need to doanything extra to make it work.
it's just a foundationalcomponent, and we need that because maybe what you've builtin minecraft with something is not printable either. so we fix it for you. and what happens here is a tonof mathematics under the hood, and it makes sure thatthe topology is all clean and watertight andprintable and so forth. it takes a few seconds andthen it's ready to go. now if you know anythingabout 3d printing,
this is not very printablein its current state. i mean it's orientedincorrectly sitting on the bed. so the print that you see onthe sort of checker floor. and it's sitting in justthe wrong direction. well, of course thereare plenty of tools. so we could pick this guy up and rotate it andget it into the right position. but because you can't alwayshave just all work and no fun. to put some things intoour applications too that
kind of show one, that weunderstand physics, and two, we can also have somefun at the same time. so i'd love to show youthis feature, actually. this feature is called settle. and what it tries to do is workout how to print it for you. there's only one problemit's the wrong side up, so just with physics it kind offell that direction, because that's where it's most heaviest,of course, but actually i don't really like it so i'mjust going to turn him around.
that's how i'vemuch preferred how. have my part. and then of course isort of need to move it around so i can kind of just. sorry about the scale. so i can move it around and it does ques like it actuallykind of snaps it to position for you as well so if i'm trying toget it into the center line. it finds these little rulers andsays, all right, you know, stop.
that's kind of centerposition and it's like stop. there you go.so a little visual feedbacks for you to kind of help with theprinting experience because you don't really want to have tobother with a really complicated application in order to dosomething that's just so simple. and then of course if i wantedto go a little bit further with this. i just wanted to turnit around for fun. isn't really going tocare all that much.
but if i turn it around justto make it all nice and neat then quick steps to do so. now, the other thing that isreally exciting about this is when you define a new formatlike what we've done with 3mf you can add modernconstructs like colors. so you remember when stl wascreated, sort of 30 years or 25 years ago,there was no concept of color. everything came out white. or translucent, actually, and
the resin material iskind of translucent. so why do you need toeven bother with color? in its defenses back then itwas about rapid prototyping, so you just wanted tocreate the prototype and you were never going to usethat in production ever. but now that youcan create these production worthy components, you wanna have somethingthat's a finished article. so, in order to do thatyou want to print it in
finished article color. and sometimes, andwe use 3d printing extensively inside of microsoft forour own products, actually. we want to print it sothat it's real. so that when you handit to an executive, they don't say,why is the thing black? i thought it wasgoing to be silver. you hand it to them in silver, cuz that's how it reallyshould be evaluated.
so one more thing that we cando in the format is assign the colors to the actualpart itself, so that it prints and it matches. because we understandthe printer as well, it matched whatthe printer can do. now the only sad thing aboutthis today is that i don't have a printer. so then, what am i going to do? well, i'm just going to go aheadand print anyway, so why not?
we live in the cloud age, i should be able to go pickup a printer somewhere on the cloud and print and that'sexactly what i'm gonna do. so as you can see there issays 3d printing service up on screen, soi found a service. and now what it's done,it's showing me not just my working area, butmy actual print space. so if this is what yousee is what you get. just like 2d printing.
so you see the actualpage that you'll print when you put in a lettersheet or an a4. the same thing here. i get the actual dimensionsthat run within the printer. now i wanted that scale cuzthat's one to one scale. so i don't want tomess with the scale. i don't wanna make it bigger orsmaller or anything else like that. i'm gonna leaveit the way it is.
so here it is ready to rock androll. now to cut things short,because when i hit order online, which i won't bother to do,but if i do, it's gonna upload this file to the cloud andso on and so forth. so what i've done to make this alot easier is i did it before i came in to do the demonstration,and you can see it upon that website. so we have a partnershipwith 3d systems so that if you don't havea printer, they do,
they have lots of themall over the world. and then you can upload it tothe system and it will give you feedback on types of process youcan use and materials that you can get, and then the costshipped to your door. it's pretty slick. the only thing aboutthis is that for some people in the audience,you might want to inform your spouse of this that some ofthe charges that you have coming forward are for 3d printing justbecause you thought it was fun.
so if a bunch of boxes turn upwith all these crazy parts and stuff like that, your spousewill understand because you've already revealed it to them. i may have been guilty ofthis a few times myself. >> [laugh]>> so especially when you're printingmetal, that's a very difficult charge of a few hundreddollars to explain. so we can see up here thatyou get a choice of sls, sla, different materials.
you can also go for somethingyou print check technologies, you can go multicolor. makes it really easy, you don'thave to invest in the printer, you can just gothrough the service. i make sort of a joke of it, but actually it'sextremely efficient. so compared to buyingyourself a printer, if you're a sort of occasionaluser, this is a great way to go. now, the fun thing, too,kind of underneath this,
as a wrap-up demonstration,is that the platform is open so today we have itthrough 3d systems. but i can see a future for us where it's more sort of likea bureau-type arrangement. so as more bureaus come on linethat want to take advantage of this, then anyone who haswindows and has this service would be able to pickthe bureau that works for them. and then that gives you a littlebit more choice about i prefer this type ofmanufacturing process, or
i prefer someone who isnear to me, and so forth. okay, so that's something thati could perceive as being very practical and also verypossible in the future. okay, so that concludesthe short demonstration for today which leaves us lots oftime for the panel discussion. and for that, i'm going tohand over to michelle, and you may take it from here. >> okay.>> just to quickly revise, this is who we haveon our panel today.
but i think i'll just leavethat up and make this a little easier, so people readingnames and so forth. >> all right, thanks, simon. so maybe we can start asjust as an introduction, could you describe what eachof your companies are for doing 3d printing and how longyour company has been involved in the 3d printing industry? >> okay,do you you want me to start? >> sure.
>> yeah, so same as plm, we'vebeen looking at 3d printing for quite awhile. we've been from top to bottom,now, if you know siemen's and plm at all, you know we havea wide range of products consolidated beinga product services. the mainstream industry allthe way up through nx which is an enterprise level solution. and we have been partneringwith guys like microsoft, even talking to hp andsome others, about 3d printing.
and what's interesting forus is that we understand that it's more thana modelling problem, it's more thana manufacturing problem. it's also an analysis problem. so we have got folks,teams of folks, throughout our organizationlooking at every aspect of the 3dprinting problem. additive manufacturing,as some will refer to it. so our modelling teamsare trying to understand and do
understand, and trying to buildout tool sets that are gonna be valuable for designersthat are building models, that are gonna be suitable forprinting. our analysis teams are tryingto understand how to deal with sophisticated latticework, someof the sophistication that may come along in the futurewith 3d printing. and then, of course,the cam guys. this is all about manufacturingat the end of the day, so they are working diligently, andhave been for quite some time.
partnering with other companies,as well as doing some internal development work to satisfy thegrowing demand of 3d printing. >> all right, so hp reallystarted to look into 3d printing for ten years, a bit more,yeah, ten years let's say. for us, it's been seenas an adjacent market. as you know, we're wellknown for 2d printers, which unfortunately are insecular decline, so we have to come upwith something else. and 3d printing came up as avery strategic play for us, and
we've looked at allthe different technologies and we ended up creating one, a newone, organically which leveraged a lot of our expertisein 2d printing. so the technology is calledhp multi jet fusion, and it tries to address some of theproblems that you have when you try to put the partsinto production in a real manufacturing environment. i was actually involved, oneof the field engineers who was doing hacking and skunk worksin the lab to get that up and
running, this was in 2009. and that evolved into managingnow all the software around it, so whatever, how we getthe data into the machines. so i have to stretch out andtalk to these guys and others in the industry to really makesure the data we get is right. and it also exploits all thecapabilities that the device can do, so that's one ofthe challenges that we have. in some of the pictures you saw,like microstructures, graded materials,
these are really hard to dowith existing software today. you need some fundamentalchanges there. and that's my focusin the last year. now, i'm moving moreinto creating end-to-end solutions for specificapplications in the industry, so we'll talk moreabout that later. >> maybe i can add something, it's that we're looking atend-to-end solutions, too, and i really hate to say this, but
one of them is paperlessmanufacturing. >> [laugh] yeah,i know, i know, i know. >> we're all sort oftrying to get the paper out of the factories, whycan't we just go 100% digital. >> [laugh]>> and so, of course, this is an additivemanufacturing, 3d printing is a really good end point togoing completely digital, so we see that as beinga huge opportunity. and, of course,we're investing in it,
as you see with the presentationi just did before about some of the platform pieces we have. so we take it very seriously. but as a company, also, we're a consumer of it, as we doa lot of 3d printing ourselves, really, we're a bigbeliever in it. and something that ithink is very exciting, an area that we're alsolooking at somewhat adjacent, is something that's beingcalled generative design.
>> mm-hm.>> it's a new area that's coming forward. now, for us,it's a very shameless plug. we have a bigcompute solution for high performance computingthat gets you there. so in order to compute thesestructures you need horse power, so we're also looking at that, which is kind of an adjacentarea for 3d printing. but it all works together asone kind of seamless flow.
so we're kind ofthinking about this in sort of multi-faceted ways. we can help you accomplisha true paperless factory, you'll have a complete digitalworkflow from manufacturing. >> okay, so the cost of 3dprinters has gone down quite a bit, and so it has made itappealing to some hobbyists and there's been a lot of activityin the consumer market. can you share your thoughts onwhat's going on in the consumer market versus potential andwhat's going on for industry for
3d printing? >> i'll start with consumers. so solid edge is verywell-positioned to sell and to what we would considervery small businesses or even the maker space. and we get somedemand in that space. now, we have noticed over thepast years that in the consumer industry, 3d printing, andi'll say this in context of 3d printing sales,if you look at the trends,
those seem to bedeclining a little bit. but if you look atthe trends in industry, you can see that there'sa lot of interest. there was one report,a cad report, that surveyed recently thatsaid that of those surveyed, 75% of those over the next threeto five years are going to be considering adding 3d printingor moving into the 3d printing, additive manufacturing space. so consumers,i think it's there, and
it's interesting tosee what happens, but i think the growthis gonna be in industry. and i believe asprinters get better and materials get more sophisticatedand can actually service in an operating environment,i think you're gonna see an explosion of 3d printedcomponents in industry. >> yeah, so to build on that, ithink there has been quite a lot of hype on consumer 3d printing. you saw that in your dailynewspaper, fortune magazines and
all of a sudden all of theseapplication were done and you can do it in your home. the reality, that softwarelike siemens' solid edge, is quite complex. people don't have an urgent needto create things at home, not on a broad scale, so comparingto the industrial potential i think it's still gonnabe a somewhat small market. the devices that you getat home, they're cheap, but the quality is alsosomewhat limited in
the things you can do. it doesn't mean that theconsumers will not get access to this technology. they can also contacttheir service bureaus, like the evolutions, soyou could get metal parts for 20 bucks,which is quite amazing. that's never beenpossible before. but we think that the realmarket is really in transforming manufacturing overall,which is like a $13,
$14 trillion business, andif you take just a small bite of that i think it'llbe very significant. >> i see this market a littlebit like the photography market, actually. i'm sure everybody hasa smart phone here, and so now you're a photographer. and it sort of happenedalso in 3d printing. you could get a 3d printer and then you werea manufacturer too.
but you soon work outthat there's only so much that you can do with it. so rather than going to justlike a camera that's slightly better than your smartphone,you didn't, you went to presume the model. you probably went out, boughta nice slr and some lenses. you really take photography on, well i also see thatin 3d printing. the makers no longer settlingfor a $1,000 machine or
$300.00 machine or so forth. they want someone withway more capabilities so they can really be kind of liketheir own backyard manufacturer. that's just in the consumerspace, but then i think that's a segway for people to takethat model into the enterprise. so one of the difficulties thatwe've seen with many companies is that they haveadditive manufacturing. and you've got investment,millions of dollars, in additivemanufacturing machines,
whether it's metal sintering orsome other process. you can't really just letyour engineers print to it. and so, you're printing intitanium, the thing is, like, $1,000 right out of the gate. so you wanna have somethingthat's more local for them, more like you would have whenyou're at home, actually. except now it's at work and it's a more professional gradeprinter and that's what i love. the strategy from hp, actually,is really taking that space on
and creating somethingwhich will be perfect, kind of decide for engineers andkind of like a resource for a group of engineers,help them do their validation, cuz they're creating new thingswhich are actually designed for additive manufacturing,and then they can take it out to the plants and take itthrough a production process. that's kind of how i seeit all coming together. >> so to building ontowhat luis were saying, 3d printing has a real potentialfor transporting manufacturing.
what kinds of things do yousee for your customers in terms of business opportunitiesand changes business models? in these cases do you see with3d printing, based on where the technology is now, and thenwhat'll happen in the future, what kind of opportunitieswill they have in the future? >> so we've been talking toquite a lot of customers in the last two years since weannounced the technology. big industrial companies andaerospace automotive, they're really pullingfrom the technology and
stretching it out. and not one of themis about prototyping. they all want to go to finalpoint manufacture because they can clearly see if they canidentify a part that can be redesigned for additive. you can get lots of cost saving,leave time reduction. you can get sometimesbetter performance. you can produce on demand. you don't have to keepa huge inventory of parts.
you can justmanufacture as you go. you can customize all these megatrends that are out there about mass customization,about local production. they can be enabledby this technologies. it hasn't been ona massive scale yet because of the limitations ofthe different technologies. however some niche cases, itwent completely digital already, things like invisalign braces, if you guysare familiar with that.
you put it in your mouth. so that's completely 3d printed, and it's all digital, andit's 100% done that way. hearing aids, also,it's pretty much 100%. whereas when you talk tothe automotive industry, tens of parts are being done,and they aerospace, maybe one, two per airplane. they just announceda few weeks ago that they're puttingthe first real part.
so it's coming up, and the technology has to catchup to that expectation, i think and once you do, thenwe can really open the market. okay. and in talking about opening up the market,what pieces of technology have made 3d printingmore accessible? and then, what's missing? >> yeah, so, i think certainlythe cost of printers. i think we'reseeing a evolution,
it's kind of, it's interestingin industry and technology. a lot of times the technologystarts out on the high end and kind of makes it's waydown into the lower end. what we've seen is,is almost the opposite. at least at the consumer level,this technology is grown out of inexpensive consumer like 3dprinters and proven the value. of course, industry all alonghas understood the value but the technology hasn't been there>> mm hm. >> i think if you, if wewatch the space, i think from
a software perspective, thethings that we need to do, is we need to be looking at ways thatwe can service our customer so when the technology for creatingthe components is available, that we can actually buildthe models and do the necessary analysis and the necessarymanufacturing information to these models, so that our userscan easily take conceptually, their ideas fromconcept through to, through the digital mock upall the way to 3d printing. and that starts at the designlevel and we talked about polish
optimization orgenerative modeling. that's a whole new technologyand i think is going to, it's really, its only legscome from 3d printing. >> yep. what models are beingcreated that they have no, really can't be manufacturedwith current technique. >> yeah.>> so that's just one example of technology that i think wouldn't have existedprobably without 3d printing.
so certainly on the designside there's a lot to do. there's a lot to do. i'll comment more onthe hardware technology. so if you look atthe technologies out there, each one of them isvery good at one thing. whether it's mechanicalstrength in one direction or level of detail, but they'rereally bad in another thing. so there's these fundamentaltrade offs in some of these technologies that force youto choose between, okay,
if i want to do this, i haveto do this way, and that way. if you look at the materialbreadth, it's very, very limited. also the speed in some casesit's faster compared to traditional injection molding,or cnc machining, but i think there needs to be a fundamentalbreakthrough in the materials and the technologies toprocess those materials. the materials we've been using,here's an example. so one kilo of abs whichis a very standard plastic,
it's like a dollar orsomething like that, but when you get to the filamentto feed in, they charge you $50. it's the same plasticessentially, and it's just unbelievable. some of the powders thathave been used, they're being provided to really,really small manufacturing and it's almost what's leftfrom the production. they give to 3d printerbecause the market is still pretty small.
it's still 4 billion this year. in fact, part of ourwork is also partnering with software on one side butalso on the material side and try to get the big materialscompany, basf, dow chemical to really look at this market asa whole and expand applications by developing new materialsspecific for those processes. so that's missing too. >> okay.>> missing parts. >> i would say actually notmuch has changed in some ways.
so first 3d printer i usedwas in the late 1990s. it was a fuse depositionmodeling machine. if you've ever seen one of theserun it's just like a little consumer printer thatyou would buy now, except back thenit was $100,000. and now they're only $1,000. it's like a hot glue gun. so it goes back and forth and it's just extruding somethingand still that technology today.
also going back in that timeframe there was a laser. so like there's a laser a lotand it was just heating up and curing something whetherit's curing metal or it's curing plastic orsomething like that. so you don't see a wholelot of change in that, but from what i've noticedactually is there is a vast range more of materialsthat are available. i used to do fdm modelsin abs which was cutting edge in the time.
you could actually use itin automotive situation and sometimes use it in aerospacewhich was really great. then when we saw a flood ofthese consumer ones coming in using cornstarch and all sortsof other cheap materials. [crosstalk] much more likea prototype and maybe it was safe enough you could eat out ofit, make a utensil or something. more recent, we've begun tosee things like co-polymers. we're seeing thingslike carbon-based and try to make things which arestronger because people have got
this desire to get moreinto like final part, which i think we talkedabout than they are just to simply be ina prototyping area. some of the other onesare really fancy that i've seen, you're gonna love this one. chocolate. >> that one's a good one. you can now extrude chocolate. you can make beautifulthings out of chocolate. which means there's an industrythough, it's kind of curious.
now, if you're a chef, maybethink about getting a 3d printer that can go model out somethingnice and chocolate for you. that's a heck of a loteasier than trying to do it the manual way, so i thinkthat's really interesting, and sugars as well, so in that spaceon the backend of manufacturing. also in fabric,which is interesting. arguably, you can say that'sa very advanced looking sewing machine, but still fabrics andthen things like rubbers things like that we're also seeing asbeing a printable material.
really kind of intriguing. >> but again just to giveyou an order of magnitude. if you look at the any objectthat you see around here something like this speaker orthis headphone there may be ten to twenty differenttypes of plastic and rubbers done to death. you look at catalogs bythese big companies, they're talking about tens ofthousands of materials, and for fdm,you're talking well 20 sls,
which is the lasercentering handful, five. half don't reallyperform well so it's at least one order ofmagnitude out of the thing and different materials toget different behavior so if you stick to very fewyou can do only so much. yeah, it makes sense. >> yeah, i think aerospace isobsessed with doing titanium, and actually that's probably theone area where they do purify and make powders, titaniumpowders, that are very fit for
purpose because it's going to beflying around, it better work. >> yeah yeah. >> that's definitely one case. >> they don't want tosave money on that one. >> no, you don't want to go and save money on that onei don't think which would be unusual, cuz normallywhen you go to fly somewhere like is the airline safe? do i like the aircraft?
then the next level of orderwould be do they use 3-d printed parts? so obviously, you don't want to even think about that,if you can. but the other area i'veseen too in medical, which i think is reallyinteresting is stainless steel. it's being able to put thingstogether in stainless. so maybe it's only a handfulin that space, but i think out of those two materials,really quite productive.
>> yeah, yeah, yeah.>> another area that's interesting, 3d printingcreates some unique challenges isintellectual property. and simon, what types ofthings is microsoft doing to help with intellectualproperty management? >> yeah, this is a great areaactually and i don't know how many sort of businesses i've metwith that sort of start with, like what are you doing in 3dprinting, we're trying to do this in paperless factory andall that kind of stuff and
then i'll just use that asa segue to what are you doing about intellectual property,and it was really great. i was talking to one of thegreat companies in the world, i will not say their name, but they're obsessed with protectingtheir intellectual property. they have to cuz they havea system and so they don't want a third party tryingto break into their system. they don't want to sort oflose the integrity of it. they don't want the experienceto be degraded and so forth.
and so they said well,we're interested in a space, so maybe we let people printat home or print at work, we let them do that, andwe control the environment. we give them the 3d. we told them to print,we do all of this, but what stops them from takingmy intellectual property and making it their own? so they bring somethingrenegade into my system. what stops them?and
i said actually this isone the the great areas, which is a little bit fuzzyat the moment because when 3d printing came out,everybody rushed and created these like marketplacesand things like that. everyone wanted to bemillionaires by creating the equivalent of a photogallery with 3d parts and things like that. and people were doing crazythings like i think i'll just go and model myselfa borg warner gear box today,
because i'm an engineer andi've got one full department. i'm just going tomodel it in 3d, then i'm gonna put itin this marketplace. well, if you're a great companylike that, there's no way i'm letting anyone use a 3d printedgear box with my name on it or model it off any of myintellectual property. i'm want to try tolock that down. so on one degreeyou say you can't. you can't help that if peoplejust reverse engineer things.
that's very difficult. but if you are the oem, if youare the creator of it, you can. and in fact it just happened towork out this way because we'd been thinking about intellectualproperty just in documents actually and so we've beenthinking about that space. it's entirely applicable whenyou have a file format like 3mf, then you can understandwhat it does. we can apply our rightsmanagement product to it. one of the things that wehad to do oddly with this,
so if you had a look at hd urmsproduct is we had to cloud enable it because thatobviously makes sense in these marketplaces wherepeople are trying to print and publish 3d printing andso forth, but you want to have somethingthat's readily accessible. and the thing i would say aboutthat that we had to work on was not just the protection of thefile itself, there's a myriad of different ways that youcan do the protection. it's actually controllingthe application.
and one of the things which ithink is really neat is that siemens supported us with one oftheir applications called jt2go. so jt is their industry standardformat used all over the world, automotive, aerospace andso forth for data exchange. they said we needto protect that. we showed them, and we saidreally protection occurs in the application and it comesdown, so it's permission based. so i want you to see the file, but i don't wantyou to print it.
i can controlthe application and that was reallythe best way to do it. rather than trying to come upwith an elaborate method of encrypting it and then onlyallowing certain procedures and things, it's very complicated. we just take care of itin the application, so the application is aware of it. and it says you may or may notprint it, you may open it for a certain duration of time andthen close it.
you may not edit it, butyou may change the material and only these materials andso forth. so it's actually a really bigarea for us is to make sure that when you create something, whichis your intellectual property, it is protected, butyou still have the advantage of scaling out througha 3d printing community. >> and luis, what types ofthings is hp working on? >> so around [inaudible]. the underlining assumptionbehind all that is that your 3d
model, the file itself, containsintellectual properties. i won't go into that argument. i'm not a lawyer but there'ssome people who will argue that your ip's not in there. but the point is that even ifyou had that file, if you go to one of these, somebody who's ina completely new shoe that and you wanna protect that ora new computer device, whatever, or if you get access to that andyou wanna build that, you have to do major investmentand tooling and set up and talk
to the plastic manufacturersto kind of replicate that. so that's the intent. so now with the 3d printingtheory, that's a push of a button, kind of, so thebarriers there is much lower. so that's what the keything people are wanting to control so you know exactlywho produced the data and who can consume it andwhere and how. so i am glad to see thatmicrosoft is putting some effort on it.
there are other companiesthat we are trying to sell the solutions to. i think on our side, what we are doing is we're notnecessarily trying to create this whole into a solution we'llbe much more trying to integrate our printers into differentenvironments whichever way. that is that the last milethat piece of cable will be between the computer thatruns the software and the device that hasto be also secured.
so probably, we'll have toembed some security feed into the printers itself tounderstand that protocol and make sure that that can onlyobey the rules that you protect. so we've done thatin 2d printing, so we have technologies that wecan embed, hidden codes, so that only the printercan decode. we have anticounterfeiting technology. we have somethings inthe laser printers, you can try that at your office.
if you try to scan andprint money, it will detect and say that it's fake, so there'resome complex algorithms there in the printer to try toprevent you from doing that. you can try. it should work i was told. [laugh] but so on our sidelooking from a more hardware perspective, we need tounderstand those protocols and we need to make sure thatwe're able to interpret that, decode that informationif it's encrypted and
obey those rules sothat it's manufactured. and then we also have technologyto add that kind of traceability and anti-counterfeitingtechnology to control the fabrication. >> and jeff, what types ofthings is siemens looking at to support a design engineerto consider 3d printing? >> support a design engineer? yeah, so right now we lookat the process of design and i think really,i think we have to, our users,
we have to help them understandwhat does 3-d printable mean and provide them the tools. so when they design a park andwhen they're ready to go to manufacture and ready to goto 3-d print, that we provide the sufficient tools to makesure that it's printable. and i saw some of thosethings today in 3-d builder. i think they can geta lot more complex. a lot of complexity and overhangand some very sophisticated technologies to understandif a part can be printed.
that's the one thing that we'relooking at from our side. you know, i think nx,in our sister product, nx and nx cam, they're looking muchdeeper at the heart of problems for helping design engineers dothe analysis, understand how to minimize material usage inusing lattice structures for support and then doing theanalysis and understanding how that lattice structure'sgonna impact performance. and then we need to work, totake all of that information and using 3mf to take thatinformation off the system and
get it into a format that canbe consumed by a printer. so a lot of opportunities andwe have fillers out and we are working in dozensof places trying to solve all of these problems andwe're making good progress but the technology isquite sophisticated. >> okay, all right, and i'd like to open it up toquestions from the audience too. there's microphones oneither side of the room. i'm gonna ask onemore question and
then if anyone has a question, please feel free to lineup at the microphone. so there's a lot of technologyinvolved for a company that's looking to implement 3dprinting, what type of ecosystem should they consider,should they be thinking about? >> [crosstalk] sowhat we usually say in hp is that it's all about the printing, until it's not. so you need to find, so
the first really is to make sureyou find the right technology, the right printer,the right materials so that it's able to produce thepart to meet your requirements. once you do that, andyou want to do the final part manufacturing, you need to builda whole ecosystem around it and that's an overusedword nowadays, but if you want to manufacturethings at scale, you need severallevels of automation. actually, siemens hasa lot of technology and
how to automate processin a manufacturing floor. there's probably severalsteps of post processing, finishing, quality inspection, that you have to do afterthe parts come out. on the data input, there'sa lot of data management to get the 3d models and their serialnumbers from different parts and merge them together andfeed it into machine. and then typically youhave a more supervisory kind of software that ismanaging that production for
you, which can be localin one single place or it can be distributedin different sites. and that's where maybe the cloudis starting to go into the manufacturing world also. i know simon has someinsights on that. so it really takesabout that note. first, figure out the parts andmaterials, the technology that will fityour requirements, create the whole manufacturing linewith post processing stations,
how you fit in material before,how you fit in later. and then all the software to fitdata in and track the results and re[port that back tothe european plm systems. so in the end the printerbecomes just a small piece of it. but if you don't doeverything else, it just doesn't work at scale. >> maybe it's, i'm gonna go tothe terminal again pop something up just quickly.
and that will act asmy visual prop for the next part ofthe conversation. so i will just exitout of this guy. and pop up to our application. so for me, i think it hasa lot to do with what you're trying to accomplish. so i do wish to discard andgo back. so let's open up thisguy as an example. so i wanted to putthis on screen,
because this is a really goodexample of generative design. and i would say that really,the ecosystem that you want for 3d printing begins with whatyou're trying to accomplish. and so for the company thatwas designing this component, in particular, for them it was weight reduction andthen it's increased strength. and so that was sortof where they began. they said how much havewe gotta get weight out, cuz we've got fuel consumptionto worry about, and
so forth, butit still has to be strong. and from there theybegan with okay, so 3d printing lookslike it will work. cuz if we're going to createa completely mad structure, like this one, in order toget the strength up and the weight out, then we're gonnahave to rethink manufacturing. because it can't be injectionmolded without making the world's most expensive tool. it's not particularly good atdie casting either, but for
3d printing this is perfect. print at any axis pretty much. so if you're gonna go to there, then what do you need to backupyour overall design chain? so for them it was aboutworking backwards. i want to get to here, i don't even know what it'sgonna look like yet, but i know my forces, and my loads,and everything else like that. so as i go backwards,
then i need to have this type oftechnology, i'm gonna need this type of compute power, i'llneed this sort of application. and then i'm gonna have to goall the way back to thinking about how to design forthis as well cuz when the computer goes andbuilds out and sort of structure it's still not something thatlooks particularly pretty or is necessarily that optimizedfor 3d printing either. it's just strong. so then you need to be able topop it into an application like
sol edge, andreally refine the surfaces down. then you need to run it throughthen it's own secondary analysis, and then take itout to printing and so forth. so, sometimes knowingthe goal is the best
way, from my perspective anyway,i was sort of, knowing the endpoint is sort of the bestway to know how to go build out that overall ecosystem. >> alright, okay.
