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Sculpteo Takes 3D Printing to the Cloud

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How a young French company is paving the way for a manufacturing revolution.

“Soon, instead of buying things that are made in large quantities at factories, we will buy objects made in quantities of just one, specifically for us.” So says Eric Carreel, Chairman of Sculpteo, a French company that is betting on an impending revolution in manufacturing, and building the 3D-printing infrastructure to help make it happen. “The materials that we can use for 3D printing will eventually be as good as materials used in factories, making it easy for consumers to customize the design of any object,” predicts Carreel. “And with cloud technology, it could be done using smartphones and tablets.” Sculpteo joins American companies like Shapeways, profiled here last October, and MakerBot in a movement to democratize mass production by giving designers the tools to produce their wares using an inexpensive, scalable single process.

Tech visionary Ray Kurzweil predicts that 3D printers will eventually be able to self-replicate by printing the parts to build other 3D printers. A team at Kurzweil’s Singularity University is even working on the concept of 3D-printable buildings, opening the possibility that developed and developing countries alike will one day be able to 3D print their infrastructure needs. Just as technology has democratized video production, transforming the broadcast media industry, 3D printing is poised to help drive a nascent creative economy by enabling what Forbes.com’s Steve Denning describes as “a massive transition from centralized production to a ‘maker culture’ of dispersed manufacturing innovation.”

Established in 2009, Sculpteo is in the process of scaling its ambitions to meet the potential it envisions for 3D printing as a next-generation engine of industry. The company is moving far beyond its original mission of enabling individual consumers to design, upload, and order personalized merchandise. Like Shapeways, Sculpteo offers soup-to-nuts object design for DIY manufacturers, along with an array of customizable collections, but it has shifted its emphasis to the technical challenges of creating a cloud-based engine that enables any business to offer 3D-printing services on its own website.

Sculpteo provides an important service by producing made-to-order models for designers and researchers at institutions like M.I.T., but its new 3D Printing Cloud Engine offers an ambitious new plane of service by giving companies the embeddable tools to develop and market their own 3D-printed objects. A “white label” version of the software was officially launched at CES on January 8, and the company has already confirmed several partners who will integrate the tools on their websites. The Society for Printable Geography, which currently has a line of 3D-printed jewelry called “geobling,” will soon begin adding new product lines using the Sculpteo Cloud Engine.

The concept of 3D printing can sound like magic, but the process, which involves the automated fusing of plastics, metals, or other materials in particulate form according to an elaborate set of digital instructions, is pure engineering. To support its cloud-based infrastructure, Sculpteo must contend with the unique difficulties of processing 3D printing as compared to 2D. “Choosing materials to clothe 3D surfaces makes the process much more complex,” says Carreel. “You can have a very nice drawing on your screen, but you may have designed something that cannot be used.” Designs are often rife with errors, so Sculpteo has created an algorithm to correct them. Pricing objects depending on form, volume of material, and technical parameters of production is an additional consideration. “Helping designers and retailers compute the right cost is very complex,” says Carreel, “so we have to develop algorithms for that too.”

Sculpteo recently signed a partnership with Dassault Systèmes—a French software and product simulation company that services businesses like Boeing and Ford—to help fine-tune the dynamic interactions among the e-tailers, designers, customers, and 3D-printing factories using its cloud-based service. Sculpteo is looking beyond the popularization of consumer 3D printing—it is creating the back-end tools that will prepare companies for a paradigm shift in manufacturing. Carreel believes that Sculpteo “will do for 3D printing what PayPal did for online payments.” If successful, the young company won’t just play a behind-the-scenes role in the Cyber Mondays of tomorrow; it will help draw the 3D blueprint for a creative economy.

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