How Steve Ballmer would sell 3D

We are glad to announce Leopoly team will be attending 

Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo in San Jose!

3D printing is impacting what we eat, wear, build, drive, fly, and shoot. Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo, “the” B2B tradeshow for the 3D printing industry, will continue its world tour in San Jose this September 17-18. The event, programmed by Hod Lipson, will feature two full days of conference sessions with two tracks to choose from. Interest in this emerging field is at an all-time high, with the inaugural New York City event attracting more than 3,000 attendees. Top exhibitors including 3D Systems and Stratasys are slated to exhibit in San Jose and showcase their services. Discover what investment opportunities exist and how your industry will be affected. Our sessions bring together leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, educators, and professionals to prepare you for the 3D printing boom and show you how to utilize 3D printing to improve your business.

Read more: http://www.mediabistro.com/inside3dprinting/fall/

The a 3D Printing Fax Machine.

- Hey Joe! Could you please scan and send me that lovely sculpture, which I've seen in your room? I'd like to print it at home.

- Sure, just wait a minute..

"Zeus, the Greek god known for transforming into animals and doing ungodly things to mortals, has reinvented himself once again, in the form of a prototype for a highly capable 3D printer.  Produced by the company AIO Robotics, Zeus is meant to fulfill the acronym’s namesake as an all-in-one machine."

Read the full article: http://3dprintingindustry.com/2013/08/26/zeus-is-not-just-a-god-hes-a-3d-printing-fax-machine

Turn Your Living Room Into a Holodeck With a Rift, a Printer and a Phone

Positional tracking is hard. Especially if you want to move through your virtual world as a physical space. Aaron Rasmussen has a solution and it’s an elegant one. His Atlas project promises to make your home a VR playground using your smartphone and printed markers.

“The beginning is a very delicate time.” A quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune which has been rattling round my head recently, specifically with regards to where we find ourselves, here at the dawn of the rebirth of Virtual Reality. The Oculus Rift opened Pandora’s box and out popped 1001 different challenges for developers and inventors to try and solve. The biggest among them, how to allow your body to move around a virtual space along with your mind. Positional tracking is the goal here and we’re a long way from reaching any sort of consensus on how it can be achieved.

Harnessing VR

Aaron has a solution though and it’s an elegant one at that. Everyone has a smartphone, so why not use it for something more than facebooking cat pictures and use it’s processing power and high quality camera to provide high fidelity tracking data. Using special markers that can be printed in the home onto sheets of normal paper, you can layout your own virtual playground on the floor of your living room. When your smartphone is strapped into the Atlas harness, the phone is angled towards the floor. When the Atlas software is loaded into the phone and paired with a backtop (a laptop in a fancy backpack), the markers provide positional information used to track your movements in space. You’ve just built yourself a Holodeck!

Read the full article: http://www.roadtovr.com/2013/08/12/atlas-turn-your-living-room-into-a-holodeck-with-just-a-printer-and-a-phone-7460

Introducing our new templates

We have already uploaded our brand new templates. You can find them at http://leopoly.com/explore/?order=featured. Now you can easily create your unique modells by shaping them further. Choose your favourite template and design a customised gift! Don't forget: you can instantly print it in 3D. All you have to do is clicking on "3D Print" under the viewed object.

3D printing with Leopoly

You can now 3D print your Leopoly creations. We're excited to let you turn your art into 3D printed things. Use Leopoly to make your own jewlery, a lovely unique gift for someone you care about or a fun thing to decorate your home. 3D printing was always a wonderful technology but now with Leopoly anyone can turn their thoughts into a 3D printed thing. To 3D print your creation simply press on the "3D print" button next to each design. You will be taken to the website of our partner Sculpteo. There you can select the material and even scale your object to make it larger or smaller. Once you order it your earrings, pen, figurine, whale, or whatever it is that you want to make should arrive within a week.

Some notes on the materials:

White Plastic is a porous flexible plastic. It is a tough material and can be used for hinges, springs and functional items. It diffuses light and makes for wonderful light shades. Jewlery looks good in this material as do art objects. It can make for very detailed prints and things such as figurines look nice in this material with good detail visible. On the down side this plastic because it is porous may absorb dirt and stain.

The Colored Plastic materials are the same material but dyed black, red, blue, yellow, green, pink, orange, beige, brown & grey. These should become dirty less quickly. The Polished Plastic is the same material but tumbled so it is smooth. Regular White Plastic feels like your jeans but this is more soapy and smooth if this makes sense.

Alumide is the White Plastic material with aluminium powder mixed in. It is more brittle and things in this material look quite space aged and techy. Alumide breaks much easier than the regular White Plastic.

For the Silver Material you get a silver coating on your object. You can use this for jewlery for example.

The White and Black Detail materials are made by UV cured resin. These are very detailed and smooth parts which can make for very good desktop avatars for example. Sculpteo will also spray paint these for you in various colors.

The ceramic material is glazed ceramics, food safe and lets you make your own cups, vases & plates. With this you can use Leopoly to customize your kitchen or dining table. You could also make ceramic sculptures. You can make your objets in eight different colors: White Glossy, Oyster Blue, Tangerine Orange, Turquoise, Aquarius Blue, Satin Black, Anis Green & Lemon Yellow.

The pricing on the objects depends on the material and the size of the thing you are making. Large things are very expensive when 3D printed but small things are affordable. You should be able to make some nice knick knacks for around $25. Just press "3D print" to see the prices and see what size and material does with the price. We hope you enjoy making your creations real with us. Please let us know what you've made and what you thought of the experience!

Make it Stand!

Make it Stand is an application, yet to be made available to the public, that allows users to modify any 3D model in such a way that, when printed, its center of gravity will ensure that it balances perfectly. 

The official publication:

Our approach combines stability objectives with shape preservation measures in order to respect the user’s original design, whilst making it feasible without the need for aids such as an oversized base or the addition of stilts. We introduced a novel algorithm that leverages the use of interior voids to manipulate mass distribution without affecting the exterior appearance of the model. We alternate between interior carving and shape deformation to arrive at a final stable result. We have demonstrated effectiveness with numerous results including character models and everyday objects, many requiring particularly delicate balance conditions to stand in equilibrium. Further, we extended our technique to objects that stand on multiple bases.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_drZksLRx94

Source: 3DPrintingindustry.com