No secret squirrel business!

What I really like about 3D prototyping and all it's ilk is the sense of community. A lot of traditional crafts still have vestiges of secrecy about technique and process, stemming from the guild mentality. Most of the people involved in this new technology want to share their expertise and research. This approach makes for faster progress in R&D and growth in results. You can sense the buzz as individuals respond to posts which avalanches into a brainstorming session. This sense of society is something I would like to somehow include in my project proposal... to add to the cooperative spirit of the Rapid prototyping world.

A beautiful partnership

Netherlands based rapid prototyping company 'Shapeways' offers an online service for anyone (they aren't the only ones). Upload your design, choose your material, they print it and post it to you..(almost sounds like a fast food noodle joint..hmmm which sauce shall I have....?) You can also choose someone else's designs and have those printed and shipped. I can see similarities in the way Shapeways and the Solheim Lab operate, it's their 'open to everybody' approach that makes the Solheim/Shapeways partnership in the case of vitraglyphy a natural step. What seemed like days after the Solheim Lab had vitraglyphy figured, Shapeways had the glass option for printing on their site (June 2010) thanks to the open source style from Solheim.

Finding the Solheim lab

At first I found references to Vitraglyphy through articles on various tech news sites, all exclaiming 'wow' and 'how cool' , but they all pointed in the same direction, to the Solheim Lab at Washington University, College of Engineering. Through that I found their blog Open3DP which is the best source of information. Later I found out that of course other comapnies and Labs have been chasing the same grail, but none are as transparently open as the Solheim Lab.