november-2010

BUSINESS | FUTURE 15
PRINT YOUR OWN TOYS
Instead of going to the shop to buy toys in
2025, you’ll be downloading designs and
producing them with your own magical
mini factory at home. That factory will be
a 3D printer, which will work in a similar
way to a 2D printer today. Except, instead
of printing layers of cyan, magenta, yellow
and black inks to create a fl at image,
3D printers will print layer upon layer
of material to build a real, solid threedimensional
object.
In fact it could happen a lot sooner
than 2025. “Printing toys and simple
plastic objects will be standard by 2015,”
says Professor Anders Sandberg at Oxford
University’s Future of Humanity Institute.
Especially since the cost of 3D printers
is falling so sharply. “A few years ago 3D
printers used to fi ll a whole room and
cost upwards of €175,000,” Anatol Just at
70 | TRAVELLER | 15 TH BIRTHDAY ISSUE
London-based 3D specialist Inition told
me. But you can already buy one that fi ts
on your desktop for less than €900.
And although 3D printers tend to use
industrial powders, resins and metals,
tomorrow’s will use… well, whatever you
want to put in them. Researchers at Cornell
University in the US have made a machine
that prints using silicone, plaster, Play-Doh
and processed cheese. If that thought has
inspired you and you’re now plotting to recreate
your very own cheesy Eiffel Tower,
download the plans at FabAtHome.org.
ROBOCARS
Forget new fuels and doors that open
upwards. The most interesting car news
for 2025 will be robocars – that is, cars
that drive themselves. It might sound like
a scene from Total Recall, but as Larry
Burns, vice president for research and
INSTEAD OF PRINTING
LAYERS OF INK,
3D PRINTERS BUILD THREE-
DIMENSIONAL OBJECTS
development at General Motors (GM), says:
“This is not science fi ction.” GM plans to be
testing driverless cars by 2015, and should
have them on the road by 2018.
Most of the technology exists already
anyway. There are cars that self-park,
ones that auto-brake, and ones that are
always connected to a central information
system. Where is all this headed if not cars
that drive themselves? “Every car maker
in the top 20 is doing R&D to automate
the driver right now,” says Philippe De
Wilde, robot expert at Glasgow University.
Robocars will bring great benefi ts – it’ll be
like having your own personal chauffeur,
but there will also be fewer traffi c jams and
accidents. Driving by sensors, robocars will
take up much less space on the roads. And
of course a computer-driver will never spill
coffee on its lap, reach for its mobile phone
or shout at the kids when it’s driving.