"Laser sintering" demonstrations at the Science Museum

I called in at the Science Museum at South Kensington to see designer Assa Asuach giving live demos of a mind-boggling new way of making things, called "laser sintering". Actually, it's very confusing because the process has lots of other names such as "rapid prototyping", "3D digital printing", and "layer manufacturing".

Basically they all work in the same way - and it's real sci-fi stuff. High-powered beams - controlled by a computer - fuse together or "grow" particles of plastic in a tank. Objects can be as intricate, say, as a piece of coral, because shapes can be far more sophisticated than with other processes, like moulding or carving.

In fact, each piece can easily be unique, as the software is so easy to change. The process has already been used for things as varied as artificial limbs and expensive light shades.

Now Assa and his colleague wants to let us all have access to it. The products he'll launch this autumn will all be made to order and can be customised on a screen at home. You'll be able to change not just colours and sizes, but actual shapes. We saw some fairly funny-looking egg cups, pens and a lemon squeezer but it's early days.

The site selling these objects will go live in the autumn. It's called Ucodo, which stands for User Co-Designed object. Assa demonstrated the software to my granddaughter Nancy (right), who of course got the gist immediately - as any 11-year old would. She thought it was all pretty cool.

For more details, visit:

http://ucodo.com/

http://www.digitalforming.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/UCODO/135310891656

http://twitter.com/UCODO