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Businessweek: The Lesson of Coraline

Coraline, the animated fantasy movie directed by Henry Selick Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and others), has brought in almost $40 million since it opened last week – not bad for an animated feature. With a toddler at home, I don’t get to the theater very often, but this week I did get to see the innovative technology behind the movie: Objet Geometries Connex500. And if the Connex doesn’t count as a disruptive technology yet, it will soon.

The Connex500 is a 3-D printer. It can take an object designed in any CAD software or, in the case of Coraline, an animation program, and “print” a physical copy. Very simply, the software slices the design into microns-thick layers, and gives the printer a footprint for each, so that it can build a model one layer at a time. Because the Connex has multiple printer heads, it can build an object out of any of Objet’s eight basic plastic materials (shown, left) – which range from rigid to flexible, and include clear, white, and black options – or combine them to create an infinite number of composites. Those material options, along with the micron-measured detail, is helping change how companies think about 3-D printing.

Source and more: Objet
Thanks to Shimrit

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