The Beautiful Rio Grande Gorge

180 Panoramic of the Taos Valley

Terri Admiring the View of the Taos Valley

While in the Taos valley, we decided it would be a perfect opportunity to do some hiking in the Rio Grande Gorge at the Wild River National Monument. The images below are 360 degree spherical panoramics. Click on the captions to view them in the Google Panoramic viewer.

Spherical Panoramic of the Trail to Arsenic Spring

As Far as the Wife can See

The Petroglyphs Near Arsenic Spring

The Rio Grande River at My Feet

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The Photogenic Fechins

Nicolai Fechin Self-Portrait

Nicolai Fechin was a Russian-American painter who lived in Taos, New Mexico from 1927 to 1933. This week, Terri and I visited the house that he built for his family and were very impressed by the adobe architecture, the hand carved woodwork and the beautiful portraits that Nicolai painted of his wife and daughter.

Alexandra Fechin by Nicolai Fechin

Nicolai was born in Russia in 1881 and studied at the Kazan Art School in St. Petersburg. He married Alexandra, the daughter of the school's director in 1913. Their daughter Eya was born the following year and after the divorce of her parents in 1933, she moved with her father to New York, then Santa Monica.

Eya was a frequent model for her father and played a critical role in the preservation of the Fechin House in Taos.

Eya Fechin by Nicolai Fechin

While visiting the Fechin House, I couldn't resist capturing a Photo Sphere of the Garden. You can take a look here.

The Garden of The Fechin House in 360

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The Fechin is Fetching in 360

The Fechin House and Taos Art Museum

The Fechin House in Taos, New Mexico seemed the perfect place to test Google's new Photo Sphere app for iOS. The new iPhone app lets you capture a 360 degree view of any location by capturing a series of images in all directions.

The Photo Sphere app leads you step by step through the process of creating the sphere by showing you a series of orange dots that indicate each view you should capture.  In addition to shooting in all directions on a single plane, the app also has you capture images pointing up and pointing down to create a complete spherical view from your current location. The hardest part about using the app is standing in exactly the same place, without falling, while turning in circles to capture each of the views.

The Fechin House in 360 Degrees.

After your sphere is captured, the software requires a few minutes to stitch the images together to compute the sphere. You then have the option to upload the image to Google Plus where it can be shared and evaluated by Google to be shown on Google Earth.

The 360 degree images are more interesting than attractive when viewed in a two dimensional plane. They are both fun and attractive when viewed through the Google Panoramic Viewer. Click here to see this sphere of The Fechin House.

The Photo Sphere app is fun and as it gains more and more users, it will be a tremendous supplement to the increasingly complete view of the earth provided by Google Earth.

Where do you want to capture 360?

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Drug Delivery Via 3D Print

3D Printed Implants for Drug Delivery via 3DPrint.com

The most interesting story I found this week about 3D printing explains a new method of delivering antibiotics and cancer treatment drugs using 3D printed implants. Researchers at Louisiana Tech University have used a Makerbot Replicator to print biodegradable implants using a filament infused with the medication.

3D printing allows the implant to be shaped in a way to provide even and efficient delivery of the medicine directly to the area of the body where it is needed. Delivery of the drugs directly where they are needed is more efficient and reduces side effects. The ability to make the implants on an inexpensive home printer has broad implications for creating personalized treatments anywhere in the world.

What is the most interesting 3D printing story you read this week?

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The Curse of the Visionary

I have written often in this blog about the value of being able to predict the future and provided several suggestions on ways to develop predictive skills. Understanding nascent technologies and societal trends can boost your creativity, your career and your investments. But that vision comes with a price.

Any careful consideration of our current situation and possible paths forward can generate frustration and fear in several ways. I call these the curses of the visionary.

The Ability to See What Could Be

There is much wrong with the world that could be different if better decisions were made about the deployment of resources and technology.  Few voices in the media and even fewer in government seem to have a clear understanding of economics or psychology. When bad policy is destined to produce poor results, there is little joy in knowing that a little earlier than most people.

The Ability to See What Will Be

If you assemble a series of possible scenarios and try to assess the probability of each actually happening, many of those scenarios will be unpleasant. Our economy thrives on creative destruction and it is never totally clear which side of that destruction any one of us will land. Survival requires preparation for the most probable obstacles but obsessing on the risks leads to fear and doubt.

The Inevitability of Generating Anger

Those who are heavily invested in the status quo don't want to admit the necessity of a course change. Visionaries are far more likely to be greeted with laughter or rage than appreciation.

The cure for the curses of the visionary is action. Choose the path that appears to be the most probable route to success and get started. Action can change the future. Action is the perfect distraction from fear and frustration. And action leads us around the curve or over the hill where the path ahead is easier to see.

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Titanium Aluminide in the News

3D Spinal Implant via 3DPrint.com

Titanium aluminide is not a material that is in the news every day. So when two news articles mention it in the same day, it is worth pointing out.

Titanium aluminide is an extremely strong and light material that is ideal for 3D printing aerospace components and orthopedic implants. These items are built up in layers by melting the metal powder using the Electron Beam Melting method perfected by Arcam AB.

The first article notes that the first 3D printed spinal vertebrae have been implanted in patients in China. This is a major medical breakthrough that can greatly help those suffering from spinal injuries or spinal degeneration.

In the second article, GE revealed that they will be using the alloy and Electron Beam Melting in the production of the turbine blades for their GEnx engine, used in Boeing’s Dreamliner and 747-8 aircraft.

These are fascinating stories and lead me to believe that we will be hearing a lot more about Arcam AB and titanium aluminide in the future.

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Shapeways Announces Full Color 3D Printing in Plastic

3D Plastic Parts by Shapeways

For the first time, full color 3D printing is available in a durable, functional plastic. The new service was announced Wednesday by Shapeways.

Shapeways describes the parts as "grainy" and that the process consists of an inkjet binder and a powder bed of plastic which implies strongly that the service uses 3D System's ColorJet technology. The service will initially be available to a select group of Pilot Designers to test the usefulness of the parts before rolling it out to Shapeway's entire customer base.

This is an important milestone in 3D printing and will open the doors to a much wider set of manufacturing applications.

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Can Design Have Integrity?

Integrity is one of the most important characteristics in a business partner, associate, even a customer. We want to work with people we can trust and rely upon. If integrity is important in a person, is it important to design?  Can design have integrity?

Dictionary.com defines integrity as an adherence to principles, honesty, the state of being whole, entire, sound and undiminished. I believe it is possible and essential for great design to live up to this definition.

Howard Roark, the heroic and visionary hero of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead followed these rules for architectural design:

What can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. 

These are important rules for mechanical designers to remember as we move into the age of additive manufacturing. 3D printers can build easily with materials that have been difficult or impossible to  shape with machine tools. They can create geometries that are impossible to produce with traditional machining processes. Those are the strengths of 3D printing that need to drive the creativity of the designer.

Direct Metal Laser Melted Part by GE

GE understands these principles and already has over 300 3D printers in operation. Using additive processes, they have been able to reduce the weight and improve the efficiency of their LEAP jet engines. GE projects that they will manufacture over 100,000 additive parts by 2020. 

What are your rules for design integrity?


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Full Color 3D Printing

World of Warcraft Figure by Figure Prints

I have been on a quest to find a full color 3D printing technology that can create beautiful and functional personalized models. In recent months, great progress has been made by several 3D printer manufacturers.

Figure Prints has been making personalized figurines from World of Warcraft avatars for several years using the ColorJet Printing method from 3D Systems. But I don't consider these truly functional. Made of gypsum powder held together with a binder, the models are brittle and best suited to display on a shelf.

CubeJet Print from 3D Systems

At CES in January, 3D Systems announced the CubeJet which offers the ColorJet Printing technology in a desktop version. The samples at CES showed fine color resolution similar to the company's larger ProJet 4500 and a video from CES by Make shows a CubeJet printed iPhone case that is full color and flexible. The CubeJet is not yet available but expected to begin shipping later this year.

For a model that looks, feels and functions similar to wood, the Mcor Iris offers inexpensive 3D printing in full color with over a million colors. Iris builds using paper and the selective deposition lamination process. Since color printing on paper is a mature and well tested method to product accurate color, Iris produces the most accurately colored models that I have seen so far. It is the only 3D printer that supports ICC profiles.

Cyan Magenta Yellow Palette for the Connex3

Arguably, the most durable multi-color parts can be made using the Objet500 Connex3 printer from Stratasys. Connex3 can print using a variety of PolyJet materials including Digital ABS which mimics the strength, toughness and thermal resistance of ABS and high impact polystyrene. The printer's PolyJet technology jets resin droplets of three different colors onto the build tray and he colors can blend to create up to 46 colors in a single model. While there is a choice of 10 different palettes of 46 colors, none of them have the color resolution to create a model with a continuous tone photographic texture map.

Every week, I see a new article on a research lab working on a full color 3D printer and even some new models coming onto the market. The definition of full color varies though and most of these processes would be better described as multi-color because their ability to blend colors is limited.

What would you like to print in full color?

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