By Chloe Albanesius
MakerBot opened this year’s SXSW in Austin by unveiling the MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, a device intended to facilitate 3D printing on the company’s flagship devices.
“It’s a natural progression for us to create a product that makes 3D printing even easier,” Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot, said in a statement. “With the MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, now everyone will be able to scan a physical item, digitize it, and print it in 3D – with little or no design experience.”
At this point, the Digitizer 3D scanner is still a prototype, and MakerBot said it will spend time testing, scanning, and 3D printing the items scanned with it.
“The MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner is an innovative new way to take a physical object, scan it, and create a digital file – without any design, CAD software or 3D modeling experience at all – and then print the item again and again on a MakerBot Replicator 2 or MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental 3D Printer,” Pettis said.
The technology users lasers and cameras to replicate physical objects into a digital form and file, MakerBot said.