"These technologies have been in use within the rapid prototyping industry for many years now, and I predict it will make the transition to a consumer technology."
Saw some techs reproducing a 5000 year old spearhead the other night. They took some kind of X-ray of the spearhead (it was imbedded in a buffalo skull) fed it into the computer and the machine manufactured a spearhead out of sprayed plastic a stroke at a time. Amazing.
YO! Sounds like a Ballistic Printer; I believe it's so named because it actually shoots out the plastic necessary to build the object. The other major RP technology that I'm aware of is Stereo Lithography, which bounces a laser beam off a spinning disc and into a vat of liquid material. So cool.
MM