Motorola and 3D Systems to offer 3D-printed customised smartphones

Motorola has signed a multi-year deal with the first maker of 3D printers and services to build mobile phone parts that can be functionally and aesthetically customised for owners.

The business partnership with 3D Systems will lead to "a continuous high-speed 3D printing production platform in support of Motorola's Project Ara, an open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.

Motorola's Project Ara is an open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.

"With Project Ara, we asked the question, 'How do we bring the benefits of customization and an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people?' That is our driving application. It requires technical advances in areas such as material strength and printing with conductive inks for antennas," Regina Dugan, head of Motorola's Advanced Technology & Projects group, said in a statement.

"And those advances must support production-level speeds and volumes, which is a natural partnership with 3D Systems," she added.

If the development phase of the deal is a success, 3D Systems is expected to be Motorola's exclusive manufacturer for Project Ara smartphone enclosures and modules, the companies said.

Avi Reichental, CEO of 3D Systems, said his companies machines – combined with Motorola's phone designs – will help create "the factory of the future."

3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) works by laying down consecutive layers of materials – either plastics, ceramics or metals – from the bottom up to create an object. The printable objects, created using a computer-aided design program, are sliced into many layers by another computer program, which tells the printer head where to deposit materials on the printer table.

"3D printing promotes a level of sustainability, functionality, and mass personalization that turns these kinds of global ambitions into attainable local realities," Reichental said.

As part of this agreement, 3D Systems plans to substantially expand its multi-material printing capabilities, including the use of conductive and functional materials. The company also plans to combine additive and subtractive manufacturing methods, and deliver an integrated high-speed production platform.

Motorola and 3D Systems previously partnered on the MAKEwithMOTO tour, a series of make-a-thons at the nation's top engineering and design schools that created open, hackable smartphone hardware and 3D printing to begin seeding an open hardware ecosystem.

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3D-printed food could revolutionise cake decoration, allow you to print your lunch

3D printed cakes and sweets are on display at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in the US.

Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest consumer printer companies, has been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods with ornate designs.

Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.

"We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker," Reichentall said. "We now have 3D printed sugar. We're going to bring to pastry chefs and confectionaries and bakers a whole range of new sugar printing capabilities.

"This is coming to a marketplace near you very soon," he said.

As if to juxtapose confectionary 3D printers, Pablos Holman – a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory – is working on creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.

The 3D food printing technology won't be Intellectual Ventures' first foray into food preparation. The lab was the proving ground for the best-selling cookbook, Taschen's Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which put a technologist's spin on contemporary cooking.

The lab used ultrahigh-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, centrifuges, rotary evaporators and ultrasonic baths to determine how food reacted at the molecular level to cooking.

In a similar scientific fashion, Holman said the lab could create printers with toner-type cartridges that hold pulverized freeze dried foods. Water could be added to the food in the extruding process, along with miniscule amounts of healthy options, such as green vegetables, with more appetizing foods to make meals more nutritious. The printers would then extrude the foods in shapes and colors replicating the meals we typically eat today – from steaks to hot dogs to rice.

Holman said his efforts are "at the dot matrix stage," as printing was in the early 1980s. "I can print out smoothies and Cliff Bars."

Another important reason to turn to 3D printed foods is to address the wildly inefficient way that developed countries, especially the US, handle the food they produce.

For example, Americans must drive to a store, buy their groceries, store it in cupboards, refrigerators and freezers, and yet, most consumers end up throwing out about 40% of the food they buy.

"Every grocery store throws out 2,000 pounds of expired food a week," he said. "We're good at figuring out how to make enough food and make it efficiently. Where we're not efficient is in the last mile between the store and your mouth.

"So now, I'm imagining, what if I had a machine with three buttons on it: 'What I ate yesterday'; 'what Beyoncé likes'; and 'I'm feeling lucky'," Holman said.

By pressing a button, the 3D printer, using a precise printer head, would put down just a pixel of food at a time, hydrating it with a needle, cooking it with a laser and repeating the process for every pixel until an entire meal is on the plate.

3D-printed food could also offer a method of tracking with pinpoint precision the effects any given food has on an individual. Because the amount of each food is measured precisely, the printer could record nutrient data, and a person's health in reaction to food could be studied over a lifetime.

Printed food could even include your daily dose of medicine.

"This meal is customized for you. It avoids allergens and injects your pharmaceuticals," he said. "It knows about what you've eaten before. We've correlated your diet's health effects for the first time in history. It makes a meal that understands who you are."

Holman said researchers closely track what astronauts consume and correlate what they've eaten with their health. "There's someone following them around with a clipboard recording everything they eat, " he said. "We need to do that for everybody."

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