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.