Photo: Bre Pettis
(quick plug for our local Sydney hacker space – robodino.org – they have a MakerBot! – now back to the excerpt from IEEE Spectrum)
Meet thy Maker: Inside a MakerBot’s frame, a computer squirts hot plastic onto a platform it controls via stepper motors. The result: 3-D photocopies.
Teleportation has been an enduring dream of science fiction. We’re nowhere near the ”Beam me up, Scotty” stage, but there are already hints of teleportation today. It started, in fact, in the 1970s, when—first with facsimile and then with computer networking—we began to reproduce paper documents at a distance by scanning, transmission, and printing. For all practical purposes, the document has been teleported. Now, what about physical objects?