Not too way back, for me, the primary week of January meant swapping the unhappy, fairy mild glow of the post-Christmas blues for the intense lights of Las Vegas. The TCT staff would do its post-Vacation pleasantries, nonetheless bleary-eyed and full from High quality Road, within the departures lounge at Manchester Airport earlier than hopping on two or three planes and diving head first into the newest 3D printing applied sciences at CES – an analogous shock to the senses as that of an early morning chilly water swim.
CES, as soon as an abbreviation for the Shopper Electronics Present, is without doubt one of the world’s foremost expertise commerce occasions, and for some time, 3D printing was an enormous a part of it. Anybody who was anybody can be there, from identified trade names like MakerBot and Materialise, to family manufacturers like Polaroid who used the occasion to launch their forays into the 3D area. It’s the place will.i.am was unveiled as 3D Programs’ Chief Artistic Officer, the place Stevie Surprise stopped by for a fast play on a 3D printed ukulele, and in case you have been new to the sector, the previous 3D Printing TechZone, then sponsored by TCT, was the place you’d need to present your merchandise amongst the Sonys and Samsungs of the world.
The 3D printing presence at CES at the moment may be very completely different to what’s was a decade in the past, again when TCT’s inaugural 3D Printing Convention at CES precipitated a line to snake across the corridors of the Las Vegas Conference Heart, in the end seeing the convention upgraded to a brand new location to accommodate double its deliberate viewers capability. Simply as CES itself has advanced to replicate the shifts within the applied sciences it platforms every year, the 3D printing trade has undergone an analogous evolution, from the halcyon days of ‘a 3D printer in each residence’ to at the moment’s CES present flooring the place the variety of exhibiting corporations targeted particularly on 3D printing merchandise could be counted on two fingers, as corporations focus extra on industrial use circumstances beneath the popular guise of ‘additive manufacturing.’
This shift, nonetheless, is a optimistic one. The 3D printing trade has moved away from racing to cost a printer at lower than that of a video games console, and onto functions that, although much less attractive to the typical client, are having an actual impression on the manufacturing flooring. Although, I’ve to confess, as my social feeds are full of CES-tagged movies of animal robots, residence home equipment with fancy screens, and varied issues ‘powered by synthetic intelligence,’ I sort of miss the excitement of all of it. I miss when it was regular for a corporation to launch eight 3D printers in a single go, when newcomers would go large on the superlatives and introduce ‘the quickest 3D printer ever,’ and when 3D printing pens appeared cute. That’s to not counsel 3D printing at CES was frivolous. Sure, there have been loads of knick-knacks and start-ups that by no means fairly made it – that was true of any 3D printing occasion on the time – but it surely was additionally the place folks got here to listen to in regards to the potentialities of printing in zero gravity from Made in Area, and the place HP and Carbon gave a number of the first showings of their respective, and now extensively adopted, Multi Jet Fusion and CLIP applied sciences.
The position of 3D printing at CES today, seemingly, is extra software targeted. Final 12 months, Lenovo’s sales space featured 3D printed furnishings made utilizing waste electronics by Dutch architectural agency Aectual, and HP’s HyperX gaming peripherals section is as soon as once more displaying customised gaming gear, which could be personalised with 3D printed add-ons.
When Formlabs, one of many few 3D printing distributors exhibiting this 12 months, launched its Type 3+ and Type 3B+ printers at CES again in 2022, Matt Lewis, Product Advertising and marketing Supervisor at Formlabs, advised TCT, “Formlabs 3D printers are utilized by lots of the inventors, engineers, and innovators who create new client merchandise which can be launched at CES.” It echoed feedback made by Formlabs CEO Max Lobovsky in 2019, who claimed that of the greater than 4,000 CES exhibitors at CES that 12 months, “3D printing was possible a part of the ideation, improvement or manufacturing for greater than 90% of them.”
CES can be as a lot a spot to point out subsequent technology ideas as it’s about gadgets you may stroll right into a retailer and purchase tomorrow. CES 2016 was the place I first noticed an early iteration of 3D Programs’ high-speed Determine 4 expertise, described on the time as “only a demo of some new expertise we’ve acquired coming,” however now very a lot a flagship product for the printing pioneer that’s spawned functions all over the place from automotive to jewelry.
However we’ve all the time sort of identified that 3D printing’s impression can be felt most in its use circumstances slightly than the expertise itself. One of the vital referenced talks from the 3D Printing Convention at CES got here in 2015 from trade guide Phil Reeves, not a few 3D printing expertise, however a breakdown of all the 3D printable elements inside a washer. It is smart then that amongst desktop printing corporations like Creality, which in keeping with figures from CONTEXT, continued to ‘crush’ the competitors with machine shipments accounting for 47% of all shipped in its worth class throughout Q2-24, exhibitors tagged with ‘3D printing’ at CES 2025 embrace additive customers like Lincoln Electrical, a U.S. producer, which final 12 months notably deployed its large-scale metallic AM expertise to make elements for the US Navy and US Military Corps.
Final summer time, I spoke to quite a few additive manufacturing executives throughout a panel session at RAPID + TCT who agreed that one of many drawbacks of the 3D printing trade was its insistence on labelling itself an trade. Moderately, they prompt, 3D printing is simply an enabling manufacturing expertise, ‘one other instrument within the toolbox,’ for a lot of sectors, whether or not that’s client merchandise or defence. Due to this fact, in case you’re making machines utilized by the aerospace trade, you’re within the aerospace trade. If it is medical functions, you’re in healthcare.
In my ten years of reporting on additive manufacturing, I’ve come to be taught that the best marker of this trade’s success is when the expertise or course of isn’t the story in any respect. In truth, on my final journey to Las Vegas again in Might, Tony Hemmelgarn, President and Chief Government Officer at Siemens Digital Industries Software program, which is exhibiting at CES this week, prompt that AM had been “manner overhyped” however added that simply because it’s not the ‘in’ factor anymore (that highlight belongs to AI, for the second), for Siemens’ prospects “AM is making an amazing distinction.” Sure, it makes my job tougher, but it surely additionally signifies that we’ve moved previous the hype that used to swell round CES week, and are focusing extra on what the expertise can obtain, enhance and optimise, which is actually all producers care about.
Even and not using a devoted zone or convention this 12 months, I totally anticipate 3D printing shall be all over the place at CES 2025, simply not within the methods we discovered it circa 2014. It was in all probability used to prototype these aforementioned robots, or make the tooling for a few of these residence home equipment, or utterly manufacture some as but to be introduced end-use product.
Am I unhappy to not be in Las Vegas this week, feeling the push of cornering folks for interviews, and being part of the world’s largest tech gathering? In fact. However I’m additionally glad to see that the expertise hype cycle is sort of doing its job. It’s been a difficult few years for the 3D printing trade, with scale backs and consolidation, the impression of which is bound to be felt all through the following 12 months, and whereas my inbox is not what it was presently of 12 months (it is truly fairly good), I will be viewing this week’s launches and bulletins by way of my additive lens to see the place the expertise is actually making an impression on consumer-facing functions, and the place we’d need to pay extra consideration all through the remainder of the 12 months.
Have you ever entered this 12 months’s TCT Awards? Submissions for the 2025 version of the trade’s annual celebration of 3D printing and additive manufacturing excellence are open till January twenty second. To search out out extra and enter your AM expertise or software, go to tctawards.com.
