Print mine with fries, please

It might sound like walking on the moon, but soon we'll be able to print shoes, body parts, sex toys and possibly even food in the comfort of our homes. Keith Tamkei investigates the wild frontier of 3D technology in South Africa

There's a boyish energy in Bernhard Vogt's voice. Like an eight-year-old showing off his Airfix collection, the founder of South Africa's largest distributor of 3D printers and consumables enthusiastically presents the machines in his company's display room.

One of them, roughly the size of a home cake mixer, buzzes as it lays rows of melted plastic that, after a few hours, will be a life-sized model of a hand.

There is every reason for Vogt's exuberance. Over the past three years, media attention on 3D technology has grown from simmering interest in décor items, clothing and jewellery, to boiling point when recent headlines announced that American law student Cody Wilson had successfully designed and printed a working hand gun and was distributing the blueprints freely online. Spurring website shut-downs and a fearful response from US Homeland Security.

Not that Vogt approves of Wilson's actions. He is alarmed, primarily from a safety point of view: "Those things can blow up in people's faces." But suddenly, 3D printing technology and its capabilities are invading our personal domain.

In Japan, you can enter a photo booth, get scanned and receive a miniature, full-colour figurine of yourself. In Amsterdam, architects are planning to print a house and furnishings using plastic and wood fibres.

This has become much more than a manufacturing utility. The ability to design and physically create an object is turning dining rooms into mini prototyping labs.

According to Vogt, 90% of his sales in SA are home printers. Even more remarkably, since he was offered the distribution licence by US manufacturer 3D Systems three years ago, sales have doubled every year.

This year, he has already sold more than 800 units.

As printers become cheaper (the current base price is around R15000) and reach major retailers, the future looks gleaming for Vogt's company.

I'm barely grasping the process of printing something physical rather than text on a piece of paper when Vogt starts leading me into a terminology and acronym minefield: digital light projection, selective laser sintering . I have to ask him to explain slowly.

First, he says, 3D printing is a misnomer. "It should be called 'additive manufacturing'." Meaning that various kinds of material are added one layer at a time to build an object. The blueprint for this object is designed via computer-aided design software, or by using a handheld 3D scanner.

The 3D printers available in retail stores will be plastic jet printers, which feed a reel of thin plastic through a heated tube and moving nozzle.

Jewellers and certain medical technical practitioners use a different technique, where a projection hardens a bowl of light-sensitive liquid resin in layers to build a flexible earpiece or ring mould. Other printers used for prototyping in the manufacturing industry, or to create high-end designer products (such as the dress worn by burlesque vixen Dita Von Teese) use a laser to sinter or weld layers of anything that can be turned into a powder, from ceramic to metals.

Bouncing around from machines that fit on a desk to some the size of a dishwasher, Vogt says one of the advantages of 3D printing, especially in the medical field, is the ability to customise shapes and sizes, such as an earpiece or a titanium hip joint tailored to the patient's femur.

When master woodworker Richard van As sliced off four fingers working a machine in 2011, he was back in his workshop a week later trying to create a mechanical attachment to replace his lost digits. He found Ivan Owen, a robotic film effects designer from the US, and together they created prototypes using machines donated by 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot.

In his tool-strewn workshop, Van As shows me the final metal product attached to his hand. "It took five hours to print a prototype, as opposed to 40 hours making it manually," he says. His digital digits have since been modified and labelled "Robohand". So far, this has changed the lives of about 80 children born with Amniotic Band Syndrome (constricted fingers, or no fingers at all) by enabling them to pick up objects. The designs are available from MakerBot's open-source website thingiverse.com, ready to print and assemble.

Van As rejects being called a hero. "This started for my own selfish need," he says. "Robohand is almost a fluke, but I'm glad I've done my bit for humanity."

As 3D printing technology heads towards finer accuracy and broader accessibility, product engineering secrecy will be difficult to maintain. Ownership is a roaring debate in the 3D furnace.

Brendan Copestake, art consultant and head of 3D solution company Parts & Labour, shows me a printed model of what appears to be a Jeff Koons balloon-dog sculpture. According to Copestake, Koons - an American artist known for his hyper-real sculptures of everyday items - made his name by taking public objects and labelling them as his own. By rendering a 3D image similar to a Koons artwork and turning it into a sellable product, Copestake says he has turned Koons's art philosophy on its head.

Will 3D printing spark innovation and invention in South Africa? Professor Deon de Beer of Vaal Tech University, who introduced 3D printing to the local market in 1993 and is a major proponent of the technology, says it already has. "We have caught up with the rest of the world and in some places even surpassed them."

De Beer runs the Idea2product Lab, which guides inventors from idea to prototype to manufacture. About to fly to a US university to speak about this model, he uses Tugo Toys as one of the lab's success stories. Based on modular building blocks similar to Lego, the inventor initially created these for his own child, and used 3D printing to prototype the product, that is now backed by a major retailer.

In the meantime, open-source designs and blueprints mushroom on the internet. Vogt says private schools in SA have purchased his printers and introduced 3D rendering and design in their syllabi.

Children can log on to cubify.com to customise and print out ready-designed jewellery or, if they have R80000, buy a designer 3D-printed table from freedomofcreation.com. Soon a generation will be as familiar with 3D software as we are with Microsoft Windows.

Vogt and Copestake agree that artisan skills will be casualties of 3D printing. "It could transform entire industries," says Vogt. "What happens to Mattel when you can print your own toys? But it's exciting. It's like being in the '80s when the first personal computers were introduced."

According to a Nasa report, the term "designer food" could soon be redefined -- a research company has recently received a grant to create a food synthesiser based on 3D printing technology, using longer-lasting powdered food sources for extended space journeys. Who knows, soon we could be ordering 3D burgers and fries to go.