Taking a page from Henry Ford and his Model T car, you can have your business card in any size you want, as long as it’s 2″ by 3 1/2″. While that’s not exactly true - case in point: my MOO cards are 1 1/8″ by 2 3/4″ - it might as well be gospel.

I’ve never met Emerson Taylor, but I think he’s got a great design future ahead of him! (Read the article)

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Full immersion in a holographic experience is in the demonstration stage. While it’s not yet the holodeck, no tactile feedback to users, it can’t be that far off until we can actually experience a fully interactive holographic display. Combining multitouch software from Obscura Digital and the Musion Eyeliner hologram projection system is the first step.

Look, ma, no hands!

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In this blog I’ve highlighted three-dimensional printing processes to create items out of sugar and to “print” human tissue. I’ve seen similar equipment used to fabricate a wide range of products.

While the equipment for fabricating sugar sculptures was a DIY - do it yourself - project, you can expect a technology price tag to be in the low to mid-five figures for hardware and software to fabricate sophisticated and detailed items.

Now you can take advantage of an online service that provides rapid prototyping at what some would call realistic rates.

MIT Technology Review - always a good source for new and different technology - recently published 3-D Printing for the Masses, an article about a new service called Shapeways that offers services at a per-piece price generally between $50 and $100. The cost is not driven by the complexity of the item, but by the amount of material needed.

The new service makes rapid prototyping accessible to anyone: budding artists, architects, product designers, and general hobbyists. A small design company might want to make samples to show a client, or an artist might want to make copies of the same sculpture created digitally, for example.

Someday we’ll just go online, pick out a “plan” for something we’d like to produce, and feed it to our 3-D printer, just like we download a greeting card template and print on our desktop printer now.

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The British Library has been developing it’s Turning the Pages project for several years, but now the project is coming to fruition. The project intent was to put rare books stored in its archives online, so that anyone can virtually thumb through them from the comfort of their home. No worries about getting finger smudges on the delicate, highly valuable pages.

So far, around twenty books have been added to the Turning the Pages project, including rare religious texts, Jane Austen’s early work, the first atlas of Europe, Diamond Sutra, printed in China in 868, Lewis Carroll’s original “Alice in Wonderland,” sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, and Mozart’s musical diary.

You can see images from 15 books in the series on the British LIbrary’s Turning the Pages site. The colors and detail are unbelievable!

Here’s a peek at the technology that makes this all possible.

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