Inkjet printing didn’t kill the market for crayons, markers, and other “dumb” drawing tools. So why not a not-smart, hand-held version of a 3-D printer? That’s the concept behind 3Doodler, a Kickstarter project launched earlier this week by WobbleWorks, a toy company in Somerville, Mass. WobbleWorks' idea is to use a pen-shaped gizmo and rolls of ABS plastic, a feedstock used in many of today’s 3-D printers, to let people draw 3-D shapes. I’m guessing the process will be somewhat meditative; you’ll have to draw slowly enough to let the plastic cool enough to support your structure; the video on Kickstarter appears to be sped up a bit. So it might not be as easy as it looks, but the minute I saw the “doodled” Eiffel Tower, I wanted to get my hands on this gadget.
Turns out I’m not alone. Earlier this week 3Doodler’s Kickstarter campaign launched with a $30,000 goal; the effort already far surpassed that goal, with more than $1.5 million in funding pledged, and that funding window stays open until March 25. Early backers are promised the gizmo in September or October; later backers have to wait until 2014.
Why does this vision of a dumb, hand-held, 3-D printing-pen so capture the imagination? It has to have helped that 3-D printing seems to have just burst out of the Maker sphere and into the broader public consciousness. Every time I turned on the radio or TV this week I heard someone waxing poetic about 3-D printing or arguing about whether or not it was somehow going to cause widespread unemployment or raise insurmountable copyright issues. So people today, at least in the U.S., have likely heard of 3-D printing, though they probably aren’t quite ready to put down a thousand bucks to bring it into their homes.
IEEE Spectrum covered the technology in "