Today we are interviewing Rob & Incara Mack. This father and daughter duo have uploaded quite a few models to our site. Rob has been a great community member, developing his handy test piece models so that everyone can order easy cheap 3D printed parts to see the differences in the materials for example. Incara in her own right is notable for being our youngest Shapeways member at 10 years old. Her model, Incaras first character is adorable and she modeled it herself! You can check out Rob and Incara's great models here.

So tell us a bit more about yourselves?

We are Rob and Incara from Sydney Australia. We’ve got a very creative little family here with all of us having our own styles and forms of expression. I’m 37, Incara is 10 and has a sister named Aurielle who is 12. We’re very interested in toy design and production at the moment and are planning to get serious about it in the next year or so.

Shapeways member buho29 printed out parts for a tiny remote controlled helicopter on Shapeways. The parts cost $25 and there were some issues with one of the connection points, balance and with the model getting dirty from oil. But, he 3D printed a helicopter! Of course he still had to do the assembly, and will need some more R&D to get it just right and added off the shelf parts to his design. But..he 3D printed a helicopter. I for one can not wait what the next versions will look like! You can check out the movie of it flying below. 

Pedestrian traffic lights are always more or less the same. Most often you can find two circles that change from Red to Green, the circles tend to hold a boring man pictogram walking when green and standing when red. Ho hum. 

When I was in Berlin recently I noticed that there they use the Ampelmannchen (Ampelmaennchen). This is a hold over from East German times and quite original because in the rest of Germany (indeed rest of Western Europe) the boring old man symbol is the norm.

I find the Ampelmannchen to be irrisistebly cute. When the signal is red, he stands there, arms outstreched as if he wants a big hug, is waiting to be joined in a circle of people holding hands or is sincere about stopping you. When the light is green and he is walking he seems hurried and busy, going places. The hat would seem to be more in place on a Spanish bullfighter but I love how they've taken something completely mundane and standard and transformed it into something original.

As of today we've gone live with the Shapeways Shops. The Shapeways Shops mean that everyone that can 3D model can now sell tangible products worldwide without any start-up costs. So if you are a designer you can join us and within a few minutes your products can be shipped, distributed and sold all over the world.

Here is a short overview:

• The rights of the designs will always remain with you.
• You can choose your own URL, Shop name and upload your logo.
• You can decide how much money you would like to make on each model.
• Shapeways does the production, shipping, billing and customer service so that you can concentrate on designing.

If you would like to open your own Shop we have a guide set up showing you how to do this.
You can also browse the first Shops here.

If you're not a 3D modeler do not despair there is lots in it for you too. This is your chance to buy a knotted gear, a functional nocturlabe that helps you tell the time with the stars, a Voronoi network with the symmetry of a snub dodecahedron or a trefoil knot of high genus hyperbolic kelp. At $22.91 including shipping it is the cheapest trefoild knot of high genus hyperbolic kelp I have ever seen! These are simply impossible, improbable and beautiful things that do not exist anywhere else.

For those handy got to have around the house items we have hollow dice, a pengiun, a one quarter scale model of a Mac iic and the cutest tabletop toothpick holder ever.

We are proud to be the worlds first marketplace for 3D printed goods. We hope to inspire: you, our community of members, to new heights in your creativity. This in turn will enable more and more people to create and buy unique objects that better reflect what they want and need than today's mass produced products do. As this happens we can add new production techniques and lower prices making the products on Shapeways even more acessible. Meanwhile as we grow and prosper our community members also grow and prosper. This reinforces our ability to inspire you and the whole thing becomes an autocatalytic cycle. That is basically the plan, so want to join in and be a part of that?

I was in Berlin over New Years and loved the place. One of the things we did there was walk around Unter den Linden. This large avenue has a lot of flagship stores on it and one of them was the Volkswagen one. As well as all the Volkswagens you could also see the new Bentleys and they also had a Bugatti Veyron. 

Surprisingly the luxury cars pulled in more people than the new Volkswagen models. It was the first time I had ever seen a Veyron. It is a very very attractive car. It is sleek, low, the tires are rap star large and the angles are dramatic and make it look very powerful. 

So why am I blogging about the Veyron here? Can you see the dash on the pictures to the right and below? Those are some pictures I took of the car from the outside. And that dashboard you can see.That is a 3D printed dashboard. The Bugatti Veyron is, as far as I know, the world's first production car to feature 3D printed materials in the final car. 

Car companies were the first big users of 3D printing and have used it for years to prototype cars and car parts. But, until now it really did not make sense to use 3D         printing in the actual cars because of cost and production issues.

The Veyron however is produced by hand, is subject to a lot of customization and is comming out in an extremely limited series of 300. Because of all these factors they used 3D printing.

If you've ever had the urge to cast your unborn children in bronze, you can now. If you go to the London Ultrasound Centre you can get an echo of your baby made and they will then use this to 3D print a cast and then use this to make a bronze cast of your as yet to be born child.  We're looking into processes such as these and things of a similar nature but somehow I'm kind of happy that we didn't come up with this one.

Although I did meet Scott Barett of Black Powder Media at SIGGRAPH and seem to remember that he had a life sized version of himself in Carbonite(a la Han Solo from Star Wars(if this does not ring a bell at the moment, uum it will take a while for me to explain)) which he had 3D printed. Perhaps we should make a Creator for this? How big is the market for people who would like life sized Carbonite models of themselves?

Photo credit JohnSeb.