The smartest dumb use yet for 3D printing

JUST SMILE AND NOD: A screenshot of customised dolls from Headbobble.com.

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There are a lot of dumb uses for 3D printing, from plastic bikinis to plastic lampshades to plastic rat-shaped cookie cutters. But I just ran across my favourite dumb use for 3D printing yet: personalised bobblehead dolls.

For around $100, HeadBobble.com will convert any headshot - of you, your significant other, your cat, your boss, etc - into a bouncy-headed figurine via the magic of 3D printing. I haven't tried it, so I can't vouch for the quality, but the pictures and videos on the website suggest HeadBobble's machines can turn out a pretty fair likeness.

There are plenty of smart and worthwhile applications for additive manufacturing technologies, mostly in either rapid prototyping or customised high-end industrial products. But then there are the aforementioned dumb applications, which include most of the things you can make on a home desktop 3D printer. But I'm going to call the bobbleheads a smart dumb application.

It's dumb in that no one on earth needs such a thing. But it's smart in that it's almost perfectly suited to the medium. 3D printers work best in plastic-like materials, and their virtue is that they make it economically feasible to manufacture one-off novelties. Unless you're a celebrity, you're probably one of the few people in the world who would want a bobblehead of yourself. Voila - now you can have it, for a semi-reasonable price.

I say "semi-reasonable" because there are other companies out there, such as AllBobbleheads.com, that offer custom bobbleheads without 3D printing for comparable prices. Apparently they employ skilled bobblehead artisans who hand-sculpt them and paint them. That sounds like it would be far more expensive - so why is HeadBobble competing solely on quality instead of price? This suggests that even the smartest dumb uses of 3-D printing are still not all that economical, at least for the time being. (Either that, or HeadBobble is rolling in some serious profit margins.)

In theory, custom bobbleheads are something you could produce on a home printer as well. But the cheaper models still print in monotone, so the results look amateurish. That's a problem I'm confident that technological advances will eventually address.

-Slate