Z Corp’s 3D-printing technology is figure friendly:
Z Corp. was founded in 1994 to commercialize a technology developed at MIT, which uses standard ink-jet printer heads — the kind you’d find in any home printer — to spray a glue or binder and colored pigment over a thin layer of a powdery substance. Do that over and over again, layer after layer, and the particles of powder (it can be a plaster or corn starch-based compound) essentially become a physical “pixel.” After a few hours, you vacuum away the loose powder that hasn’t been sprayed with glue, and what remains is a 3-D printed object.Though others had marketed similar machines before, Z Corp. made a splash with its speed, its low cost, and its ability to print objects in color. The midrange printer Z Corp. will use to make the Rock Band figurines sells for about $40,000.
In 2005, the start-up was acquired by Contex Scanning Technology, a Danish company, for an undisclosed sum, though I’m told by a former Z Corp. executive that it was “more than twice” the company’s $40 million in revenue at the time. In turn, Contex was sold to a private equity firm in Sweden last year, for about $240 million.
In case you didn’t catch that, Z Corp’s novel business model is to sell custom figures of computer-gaming avatars:
Starting with the release of the game Rock Band 2 this month, players will have the option of purchasing a collectible plaster figurine of the character they create – whether it’s a lead guitarist with a Mohawk or a screeching lead singer sporting a skimpy bikini top. (The game is produced by Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems, a division of Viacom Inc.) The $75 figures will be produced at Z Corp.’s Burlington headquarters and shipped to players about a week after an order is placed through the Rock Band website.“3-D printing should migrate anywhere people are using 3-D data,” Kawola says, envisioning the new venture as something that could generate “$20 million, $30 million, $50 million in revenue” for the company.
Watch the video to get a feel for the technology in action.