I agree there's huge potential, one of the reasons I'm working on a start-up in the space. However, I think the media has done a really poor job of explaining 3D printing and so its important to separate the narrative from the reality.

I'm not sure I agree with that 3D printing will revolutionize mainstream manufacturing. While it's great for specialized, high-precession parts like this which could not be made any other way. It's highly inefficient for any kind of manufacturing at scale. The economics of 3D printing are fundamentally different from traditional manufacturing in that there's no economy of scale.

That's exciting news for the medical industry because there is also no overhead, which means that customization (think implants, prosthetics) can be easily and inexpensively customized. However, its more likely 3D printing will be used for applications which are already customized (i.e. dental crowns) and replace existing tooling (i.e. CNC). That's likely to bring down the costs of medical devices, but hardly a revolution.

As for food and houses, those seem pretty limited and while printed organs are super exciting, that process has about as much in common with 3D Printing as it does with gardening.

That said, I think 3D Printing will change our lives in a number of equally important ways.

1. In the short term, the falling cost of 3D printing will allow designers and engineers to iterate and learn from their users much faster while reducing the barriers to entry for product design and development. This coupled with small-batch manufacturing services (like Protolabs), and crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter allow anyone to quickly design, market, sell, produce and distribute new products and services.

In the same way elastic computing (the cloud) has enabled a new class of developers to create and distribute software faster and less expensively, elastic fabrication (3D printing) is enabling a new generation of makers to manufacture and sell hardware more efficiently.

2. In the longer-term, improvements in the performance of 3D printing have the potential to change the way we design a lot of things. While a lot of what we consume is well-designed for a generic customer, its easy to imagine a class of consumer goods which would benefit from deep customization, particularly anything that interacts with the body/ touches the skin. Shoes build around foot scan, represent a significant shift from standard US/ UK sizes. But its more than just automating bespoke design, digital fabrication and generative design tools can build objects from streams of data. What if that shoe was optimized for your walking patterns or local terrain. What if learned from each step you took and evolved with every print, what if all of our shoes communicated with each other, what would we learn about the way we walk and wear them.

Exciting stuff, no?

To get to a world of talking shoes, I think we need to deal with short-term adoption. As I see it we're in the early days of the cloud, before ec2 and heroku. The underlying technology is there but we have to build out the services and ecosystem to support people who want to take avantage of it.