Shapeways opens 3-D creation marketplace to the public

August 12, 2009 | Jared Newman | Comments | |

Got an idea for a 3-D design you’d like on your desk or dresser? Starting today, a company called Shapeways will let you hire people to design and build it.

The company takes a page from Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” marketplace, which allows developers and businesses to crowdsource tasks for a price. Shapeways‘ version is intended specifically for the creation of 3-D models.

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For instance, let’s say you’ve been dreaming of a paperweight that looks like Master Chief from Halo but also holds pens. By visiting the Shapeways’ “Co-Creator” marketplace, you can look for a designer who will model the object in 3-D based on your specs and illustrations. Then, the model is uploaded for free to Shapeways’ Web site, where buyers can order the actual product.

The model creation concept launched in July, and today it will opens to the public, adding the crowdsourcing feature that allows inventors to find people with knowledge of 3-D modeling.

Shapeways, based in the Netherlands, delivers the molded models, which can be sculpted from plastic, nylon or metals, within 10 days. The creator pays no fees to sell the printed models, which generally cost between $50 and $150.

This is one of several ways people can create and purchase 3-D products through Shapeways. The website allows for the creation of specific items, such as styluses and cufflinks, and in March began offering a way to convert photos into 3-D artwork.

The do-it-yourself mentality is blowing up in the 3-D industry, with other Web sites and companies offering their own takes on product creation. Fabidoo and JuJups let users make crafts from set templates. Makerbot sells a home printer, and offers a community for sharing work. Shapeways’ Co-Creator is geared more towards commerce, with inventors paying designers to bring their ideas to life.

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About the Author, Jared Newman

Jared is a freelance technology journalist based in Los Angeles. He covers all topics for VentureBeat, including digital media, social networking and mobile apps. Before going full-time as a tech writer, he earned a master's degree in journalism from New York University and wrote for a daily newspaper in Connecticut.

Elsewhere, Jared writes for PC World, Technologizer, GadgetCrave and The Escapist.

  • Miramon
    This is nothing at all like mechanical turk except inasmuch as it's also a labor bourse. But such things have existed since prehistoric times. You might as well say it's like monster.com. mturk is on the extremely low end of the scale, and monster.com is on the high end, and this is clearly somewhere in the middle.

    Shapeways is a cool site for people who don't have their own 3D printer and who want to play around with 3D design.

    However, I doubt there is any substantially useful or valuable thing that it can create to actually sell -- these objects are quite expensive except as one-offs and nothing more than toy designs seems to be possible. So in turn, I doubt that there will be any substantial amount of business conducted through design assignments on the site, since there will be little commercial motivation for amateurs to design the kind of objects that Shapeways can print out.
  • weijmarshausen
    Hi Miramon,

    there are quite a few things you can make besides toy designs. There are people making improved parts for R/C helicopters, but also jewelry (Shapeways offers metal). So there is quite a wide range of applications.

    The limiting factor is skills to use 3D software. You might see something, that you want, but lack the skills to adapt it to your exact specs. The Shapeways co-creator platform links people with the need, with people with the skill to adapt. The latter group also has the option to make some money with that skill.
  • Miramon
    Weijmarshausen -- by "toy" I meant "of negligible real-world value" not necessarily referring to actual toys for children. Costume jewelry made out of resin or metal particles counts as "toy" in my book. It's hard for me to believe that there is much market for such stuff compared to ordinary silverwork or jewelry made from other conventional materials, which I admit requires some considerable investment of time and effort to learn to produce, but for which a vast array of types is available, both online and offline.

    In general one-off designs, or designs printed to please some individual hobbyist and no one else, don't seem like they are very likely candidates for this designer program, but on the other hand, if you need a hundred or a thousand or more parts for some industrial application, I would have thought a conventional machine shop could do a better job.

    It's interesting that people are using the service for actual machining tasks, like for custom RC model parts as you indicate. That is a non-toy application (even if the parts wind up being used in toys!) because the component actually does something and yields a useful object that presumably is otherwise not generally available.

    I would suppose that a professional machinist with a mill and lathe could produce a superior part from scratch at a lower cost with better materials, but on the other hand, I have no idea where I would find a "freelance machinist" to do this work if I wanted such a thing, so Shapeways may well be filling a real commercial niche in this area if there is significant demand for this kind of thing.

    From surfing the Shapeways gallery, I found a bunch of very nice little designs mixed with a bunch of junk made by people just playing around with the service. However, those nice little designs didn't seem like they would be very appealing for most people to actually buy. I mean, a 3" klein bottle or a stella octangula is a pretty thing, but would I pay $100 for it? Not so sure.
  • SivamK
    Hi Miramon,

    You raise some very important points that needs to be addressed. We are used to a world pf "real-world-value". But look at stones - diamonds, they are of no real use but have real world value. 98% or people cannot tell the difference between a natural diamond and good quality synthetic ones which has considerably less real world value.

    However, the point you make is valid. Value needs to be created for people to buy. This is a challenge. Personalization and making one offs is a way of creating significant real world value.

    This is early stage in 3D printing. If you had looked at pack-man and computers in late 60's wonder if you would have seen a future for computers in games ? remember that only hackers and nerds were excited by this stuff then.

    Any user created site has 99% of low quality stuff. Zazzle boasts 17 billion designs, the ones that float on top are good as any you can find in shops. So the challenge is to create a large body of work and have a way to filter the best.

    Shapeways is an ambitions undertaking, as it combing the crowd sourcing of product ideas with new manufacturing technology which is still in its early stages and primarily used for prototyping. But this is likely to change. The challenge now is similar to the challenges faced by those who developed pack-man, what kind of cool stuff can be made given all the constraints and limitations ?

    Any ideas on this one ?