[music playing] CARINE CARMY: 3D printing is a technology that lets you take a digital file and turn it into a physical product.

SAM CERVANTES: Almost anything you can imagine, people are creating.

I think it's going to open up whole new opportunities in areas of mass customization.

MICHAEL WEINBERG: Unlike with music or movies, with the 3D printer, a lot of things that are printed aren't protected by copyright.

JOSEPH FLAHERTY: One of the really cool things about 3D printing is it really changes the dynamic of a consumer culture.

It turns you from being a passive consumer to an active creator.

SAM CERVANTES: 3D printing is this amazing new technology where you can take a 3D digital file and with the click of a button, use that file to create an actual physical 3D part.

So how does a 3D printer work?

The first step is to get a 3D file.

And you can get your 3D file in one of two ways.

One, you can simply download the file from the internet.

The second way is you can design your own 3D part.

The software is going to slice your part up into layers.

By building a part layer by layer, you're able to create a plastic part in three dimensions and the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

People will create their next big invention or engineers and designers create small production runs or little prototypes.

Teachers can use it to print out teaching aids.

If a teacher is doing a little lesson on a ship, they can actually print out a sailing ship and pass it around the class.

And people print out things for around the house.

iPhone cases are pretty big.

You break a towel hook, you can print out a new one.

We want to make 3D printers at a price that the average person can afford and also easy to use.

We're already seeing late-stage early adoption of 3D printing.

But for me, the exciting thing is what's to come.

CARINE CARMY: Shapeways is an online 3D printing community and marketplace.

Anyone in the world can upload their 3D model and we'll print for you.

And then also, if you decide you want to make it for sale, you can sell it and we'll produce it on demand for that customer wherever they are in the world.

You can essentially bring a product to market with no risk.

You don't have inventory anymore.

You don't have to make sure that there's a market ready for your product.

If you sell one, that's awesome.

If you sell 10,000, then all of a sudden, you have a passive income model and that radically changes the economy.

Usually, to bring a product to market takes a year.

And then, you have to find the manufacturer and the investor.

And so it's going to force us to change the way we think about not only buying products, but how they're made.

One of our colleagues broke his stroller and it would have cost him something like $250 to get that part in the mail from the stroller company.

And he literally just 3D-printed a stroller part and got it for $20.

You have this explosive technology where everything is made just for you, but at the price and quality of something you'd buy in a store.

This could be a scary technology for some companies, because what does that mean for seasons now?

You have infinite inventory and what does that mean for scarcity, which is one of the core tenets of so many industries?

I think it's very similar, though, to social media or other tools of engagement, where you're afraid to see what that would mean to let consumers co-create with you or to really rethink your traditional manufacturing process, because you have so many middlemen.

I think we just have to stop thinking that you need to reach 100,000, a million people for something to be successful.

Customization, it's really changing the way that we have to think about design and production, as well.

MICHAEL WEINBERG: People who make money by selling things that are all of a sudden easily copied with a 3D printer are going to be worried that people are going to be making unauthorized copies with those 3D printers.

And I think one of the challenges for them is going to be, well, how do I react?

Objects that are artistic objects, that are objects that you would hire an artist to make, those things are all going to be protected by copyright.

But those objects that actually do things, that have a use besides just sort of entertaining or looking nice, a lot of those are going to fall outside the scope of copyright.

They might be protected by patent, but a lot of them won't be protected by any sort of intellectual property at all.

And as a result of that, you can use them or improve upon them or build on them as much as you want and no one can stop you.

3D printing right now is at its very beginnings and so you don't have a lot of case law about everyday people making exact copies of physical objects, and certainly not a lot of case law about people being able to do that on a large scale.

The good thing, hopefully, is that the industries that are disrupted by 3D printing have the model of the music industry to maybe learn from.

The music industry, when someone started copying things, decided the best thing to do was take their time and their money and invest it in suing everyone they could find and try and stop the progress of technology.

That didn't work very well.

And so the hope is that these creators, when they see these new technologies, they capture some of the upside and they say, oh, wait, this can change my business for the better and they do that.

It's a hard thing to do, but the music industry has taught us that it may be the thing they have to do.

JOSEPH FLAHERTY: 3D printing's going to have a profound impact on all of us, whether you consider yourself a designer or not.

In the future, there are going to be 3D printers that will allow you to actually create three-dimensional structures out of living cells.

And they can build very complex structures, like blood vessels or skin tissue.

And the idea there is that in 10 or 20 years, these scientists are going to be able to 3D-print tissue that could replace damaged vessels of the heart or they might be able to print replacement organs.

So you won't have to go to find an organ donor anymore.

You'll just be able to have one 3D-printed at the hospital based on your own cell and your own genetic makeup.

Right now at MIT, scientists are working on 3D printers that would actually allow you to print food.

And who wouldn't want that in their house, right?

If you could just ask Siri to cook you a steak, I mean, it's really going to be an exciting time in the home.

In Japan, there's a company that's taking sonogram data.

So they scan a pregnant woman's belly and they're able to actually 3D-print a figure of her torso.

So instead of just having a fuzzy little black and white picture, you're getting a real model of what your child is going to look like.

People are using 3D printers to do all sorts of interesting things in terms of the environment.

Researchers are using 3D printers that can print concrete to make replacements for parts of the Great Barrier Reef that have been damaged.

Normally, those reefs take thousands of years to build.

But what these scientists do is they find the areas that are damaged, they make CAD replicas of those damaged areas, and they print them in concrete.

So it's a base structure upon which coral can create a top layer.

And that helps reinvigorate the environment.

It helps return normality to that area.

And one of the coolest things about 3D printing is that it's a community that never stops innovating.

There are hundreds of innovators who are making little tweaks to these products, who are trying out different things.

And so it really gives everybody an opportunity to create anything they could imagine.

[whirring] CARINE CARMY: 3D printing is a next wave of how brands and consumers can engage.

And now, we're just starting to see that happen.

JOSEPH FLAHERTY: In a few years' time, they're going to be no more difficult to use or difficult to understand than a camera phone.

MICHAEL WEINBERG: The way to protect creators and designers is to make sure to give people a way to spend money on 3D-printed things.

SAM CERVANTES: In the future, we're going to see a lot more people unleashing their pent-up creativity and that's what's most exciting for me.

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