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3-D Exhibit at McDonough Targets All Ages
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- If all the talk about additive manufacturing and three-dimensional printing over the past year seems hard to grasp, the new exhibit at the McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University helps make the abstract concrete.
Re-shaping Ideas: Ingenuity in 3-D Technology, which opened Friday and runs through Aug. 2, aims not only to show visitors how the technology can be used but allows them to sample the technology themselves.
The goal of the exhibit is to help laymen better understand additive manufacturing -- its role in "reinventing manufacturing" and impact on their daily lives, said Jack Scott, president of Applied Systems & Technology Transfer, sponsor of the innovation creation space in one of the four galleries.
The other three galleries in the exhibit feature text, images and video exploration of the past, present and future of 3-D printing. The galleries "show how the 3-D printing application stretches through industry from aeronautics to the automobile industry to medical science, biomedical science, fashion and architecture," said Leslie Brothers, director of the museum.
The exhibit offers "a full range" of where technology is, its origins and where it's being used, she continued. "For somebody who doesn’t know about it, it's overwhelming," she remarked. "It's inspiring. It’s stimulating. It’s overwhelming and pretty wonderful."
The demonstration space offers four MakerBot Replicator 2 units, each of which costs about $2,400, Scott said. Visitors can create a solid model or modify an existing design, preview it in a virtual 3-D environment and use one of the printers to create the object.
Among the options is creating and personalizing a gear to add to the wall-mounted Ideas in Motion-Add a Gear project. This fall, the equipment will be used in a program at Kirkmere Elementary School.
Brothers emphasized the demonstration space is for all ages, not just young people. "We tried in the press release not to gear the outreach for that," she said. "This is something that adults are going to enjoy and be equally blown away by, and even more so," she said. "The younger folks are the ones who already know about this technology."
She recalled a father and son's visit to the museum a month ago when the exhibit was still being put together. During the visit, the son showed the father a 3-D image on his smartphone and told him that someday he would be able to print the object. "The father had a look of absolute dismay and wonder," she recalled.
"It's almost like science fiction," Scott said, comparing the technology to the devices – which share the MakerBot units' name – in the Star Trek franchise. As opposed to the devices in the exhibit, which use polymer wires as the base material, the replicators popularized on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and its spinoffs that converted energy into material objects from food and beverages, including Captain Picard’s favored Earl Grey tea, to clothing and ship components by using programmed patterns.
"Talk about crossing generations," Brothers remarked. "Everybody gets that. … Everybody seems to get the replicator." Just as people now can download content, she added, 3-D printing allows them to download objects. "That's a never-before thing," she said.
"It's probably one of the most innovative technologies we've seen certainly in this decade," Scott commented. "Who knows where it is going to go?" Part of the mission of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, and of AST2 as a member of NAMII, is to take that technology "away from the exotic" and bring it into mainstream manufacturing and everyday application "and realize the potential it can have to reinvent the way we make things," he said.
"It's not the future," she remarked. "It's now and it's going to be with us for a long time to come."
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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