Bring Design Concepts to Life - The Library launched the 3D Printing Service at the Learning Garden for students and staff in September 2014. The service aims to inspire students to explore new interest in design and help them to bring their creations and design concepts to life. We are ready to launch the second phase of making 3D Scanning Service available! Who Uses 3D Printing Service? - result of a pilot
To make 3D printing service as one of the Library services, a pilot was started in the Learning Garden with an UpPlus entry-level 3D Printer. The second 3D Printer, MakerBot 5 supported with larger build size arrived two months later. Over the seven month pilot, a total of 239 build objects were successfully printed. The top five usages in percentage are the Faculty of Engineering (36.5%), Science (22.2%), Business Administration (15.9%), Medicine (14.3%) and Arts (7.9%). As anticipated, the main user groups are students with undergraduates 57.6% and postgraduates 24.2%, the remaining 18.2% are teaching, academic or administrative staff.
Unfamiliar with 3D printing, some users may provide poorly designed or incomplete models for printing. The Learning Garden staff offers consultation service when necessary to students and staff on their 3D models. In general, users are satisfied with the consultation service with 75.8% rated very satisfied. However, only 63.6% of users are very satisfied with their printed objects, this may be related to the limitation of entry-level 3D printers to produce a fine product.
| Consultation Service | Percentage |
| Very satisfied | 75.8% |
| satisfied | 24.2% |
| Not satisfied | 0.0% |
| Very satisfied | 63.6% |
| satisfied | 36.4% |
| Not satisfied | 0.0% |
What's next? 3D Scanning Service
The Library will soon offer 3D Scanning Service at the Learning Garden for current students and staff to capture a physical object's exact size and shape into a digital 3-dimensional computer file. This service equipped with NextEngine 3D Laser Scanner and Structure Sensor 3D Scanner may help students and faculty to utilize precise measurements of the physical objects and improve the number of prototype design cycles required.
NextEngine 3D Laser Scanner is suitable for capturing stationary objects with high resolution. The scanning is a time consuming process, which may take about 30 minutes to several hours depending on the number of scans taken to build the finished model. Each captured view takes about two minutes. A typical object can be fully captured in as little as 12 views.
Structure Sensor 3D Scanner uses a process known as structured light, in which an infrared laser projector casts a specific pixel pattern on the scene in front of the sensor. The infrared sensor and camera record distortions in dot pattern at VGA (640 x 480) resolution and creates a 3D-depth map of the scene when you move the Scanner around the scanned object.
The 3D Scanning Service is coming soon! Stay tuned!
