麻豆传媒

Read more: 鈥�Seven technologies to disrupt the next decade鈥�

It鈥檚 early evening and you pull the car into the drive of your new home that was erected in just two days. Since it is your wife鈥檚 birthday, you are clutching a personalised gold necklace that you picked up from the printer. For dinner tonight, you won鈥檛 need to do any chopping or peeling 鈥� ingredients just go straight into your kitchen fabricator.

Creating objects, buildings and food on demand will soon become commonplace, thanks to 3D printing. To produce an object, a 3D printer pipes out the chosen material 鈥� metal or plastic, say 鈥� one thin layer at a time to build up the required shape. Early printers used plaster or resins, which were sometimes brittle or slow to dry. New materials, such as ABS plastics and photopolymers, offer greater flexibility and robustness to help 3D printers create a wider variety of objects.

Smaller scale 3D printing is already used for making and . And it is increasingly being employed on a grander scale 鈥� for example, in trial projects where buildings are constructed by huge gantry robots that pour fast-setting concrete.

Biofabrication is also being combined with 3D printing to produce artificial bones. , at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has created tissue that can be used to bioprint human livers, knows what she is hoping for: 鈥淪omeday, personalised organs on demand.鈥� Combined with other tissue culture methods, this could reduce possible complications by producing organs that are tailored to fit the recipient鈥檚 needs precisely. No more using adult organs for children, for instance.

It鈥檚 a dramatic example, but it demonstrates how far the influence of 3D printers could reach as their price falls. Industrial manufacturing could be transformed, with companies able to deliver many more designs and parts on demand. Alternatively, consumers could bypass large-scale manufacturing altogether and have objects printed locally or in their own homes. Global import and export patterns could shift dramatically.

Eventually, almost anything could conceivably be printed, copied or customised. Conjuring up anything you want could be as easy as pushing a button.