{"id":2337,"date":"2013-11-08T22:09:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T22:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shapeways.com\/blog\/archives\/2337-friday-finds-future-flashbacks.html"},"modified":"2014-07-03T17:31:31","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T17:31:31","slug":"friday-finds-future-flashbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shapeways.com\/blog\/friday-finds-future-flashbacks","title":{"rendered":"Friday Finds: Future Flashbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"
Inspired by our meetup at MAD yesterday<\/a>, I walked around the museum admiring the incredible art and products that have been made possible through digital manufacturing techniques. <\/span><\/div>\n
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Besides art, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the other cool 3D printing innovations in recent history.<\/div>\n
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Lets call it a Future Flashback Friday Finds…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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3D Printing an artificial reef<\/a><\/div>\n
Just as bustling cities attract people, underwater, coral reefs attract sea life. On Bahrain’s coast, like many others in the world, overfishing has had a major impact on the health of marine life. Reef Arabia, a team of artificial reef designers, turned to 3D printed sandstone to create custom structures to submerge: “With 3D printing we can get closer to natural design because of its ability to produce very organic shapes and almost lay down material similar to how nature does it.” <\/div>\n
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Wade’s ‘Make a Wish”<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Wade has brittle bone disease, meaning that even the slightest injury can easily break his bones. Because of this, he doesn’t get to participate in many physical activities. Instead, Wade turns to video games to live out vicarious adventures. Wade’s wish was to see how games were made and to become a character in a videogame. Robot Games<\/a> invited Wade to their studios where he got to be a games developer for a day, he even got to make himself into a character…and we 3D printed it for him at Shapeways.<\/div>\n
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Health and Medicine<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From bespoke prosthetics<\/a>, organ printing<\/a> and a father-son moment<\/a>, 3D printing has enabled people to make truly tailored prosthetics and medical advances, even at the grassroots level. As this incredible story from our friends at MakeBot shows, people are harnessing the power of 3D printing in their homes to solve their specific problems.<\/div>\n
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