3D printing is venturing beyond plastic and into your home

When you think of what 3D printing can do, you probably imagine simple plastic models and parts -- clever, but not exactly revolutionary. If you ask Dovetailed's Vaiva Kalnikaite and Make's Anna Kaziunas France, however, they'll tell you that 3D printers can accomplish much, much more. Dovetailed's 3D-printed fruit is just the start of what you can do with food, for example. Kalnikaite told Engadget Expand guests that 3D printing offers not just extra creativity with how you present meals, but a way to change the meals themselves. Do you like the taste of bananas, but not their texture? You could print food that offers everything you like, and nothing you don't. This could be particularly helpful if you have a food allergy, since you could enjoy food that was previously off-limits.

Kaziunas France adds that even relatively ordinary printers are working with a lot more than plastic. There are new and modified printers that can handle bronze fills, nylon and other materials that improve the quality of objects; they don't feel quite so much like prototypes. Laser sintering (which packs powders into solid forms through heat and pressure) also upgrades the appearance and behavior. It'll be a long while before you're working with difficult substances like metal, but you're no longer bound by many of the technological limits of years past.