"Can 3D printing become a solution for the housing shortage?" PBS NewsHour 2/23/2022
Excerpt
SUMMARY: It's often said that there’s no place like home. But what if that home was built with a 3D printer? Only a handful of people in the U.S. currently live in these types of houses, but some believe this will soon change because of 3D-printing technology’s potential to reduce construction times and costs. Stephanie Sy reports.
SUMMARY: A professor from upstate New York is transforming the world for young people in need of limbs. WXXI's Innovation Trail offers his story in his own words.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): A professor from Upstate New York is using technology to transform the world, especially for young people in need of limbs.
He shares his experience in his own words as part of this trip down innovation trail, a series of reports on the economy and technology in Upstate New York.
This report was produced by WXXI in Rochester.
JON SCHULL, Rochester Institute of Technology: I’m Jon Schull. I’m a research scientist here at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I’m in the Center for Magic. RIT is a center for media, arts, games, interaction and creativity, where I run a lab on access and collaboration technology, which is how I got started founding an organization called e-NABLE — e-NABLE.
And what we do is, we make mechanical hands for children who are missing fingers using 3-D printers, and we give them away for free. Just like printing a document, you press print and the 3-D printer starts building this object that you designed on the screen by putting down tiny thin layers of plastic like a glue gun, layer by layer by layer, building it up to make the thing.
A prosthetic arm these days costs about $40,000. One in 2,000 kids are born with some kind of an arm or hand abnormality. They don’t get prosthetics because it makes no sense to spend $40,000 on something they’re going to outgrow in a year. With a 3-D printer, we can start making these things almost for nothing.
Instead of $40,000, you can do it with about $10 or $20 worth of plastic. And it’s not as sturdy as a $40,000 titanium artificial arm. On the other hand, if you outgrow it or break it, you can make another.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): There is yet another technological transformation underfoot. And this one turns ideas into physical realities right before your eyes.
Science correspondent Miles O’Brien has the story.
MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour): At Hod Lipson’s lab, they are on the leading edge of a method of printing that presses the process into a whole new dimension, the third dimension.
HOD LIPSON, engineering professor, Cornell University: This is a real revolution. It can really change things forever, how we even think about design.
MILES O’BRIEN: Lipson is an engineering professor at Cornell University. His lab is a toy box and a playground for a new generation of designers.
Undergrad Jenna Witzleben is designing and printing some ballet shoes.
JENNA WITZLEBEN, undergraduate student, Cornell University: This is actually a scan of the shoe itself subtracted the — the scan of my foot.
MILES O’BRIEN: Grad student Robert MacCurdy is working on what they call bit blocks, small circuit boards.
ROBERT MACCURDY, Cornell University: This gives us kind of a quick way of incorporating electrical functionality into 3-D printing
MILES O’BRIEN: And Apoorva Kiran is priming the pump for projects that print in more than one material.
APOORVA KIRAN, Cornell University: This ink is strontium ferrite. It’s a kind of iron (INAUDIBLE)
MILES O’BRIEN: 3-D printing was invented 30 years ago, but it’s now coming of age. The devices can print in all kinds of metals, produce food and even human tissue. And the technology is coming home, just as computers did in the early 1980s.
