December 12, 2011 
Australian startup Beehive are crowd funding a “design your own 3D printed eyewear” interface.
The Beehive team of industrial designers and engineers (including Engineers Without Borders founder Daniel Almagor) are branching into online design interfaces.
The website, which is under development , will let anybody jump into the design process, creating a unique eyewear design that will be 3D printed.
“We were inspired by the Spore Creature Creator to make eyewear design fun and intuitive”, said Adam Long, co-founder of Beehive.
“You can change the shape, style, and pattern of the eyewear and then upload an image or text to emboss into the frames.”
“You can even upload an image of yourself to try on the style. When you’re ready, hit “go” and we 3D print them for you.”
3D printing is an exciting rapid manufacturing technology that was made famous by an Economist article earlier in the year showing a 3D printed working reproduction of a Stradivarius violin.
“When you print on paper the ink has a tiny bit of height above the page. If you printed the same thing on the same page again and again it would stack up. So instead of ink, we use plastics and metals to create amazing new objects – including eyewear!” said Adam.
3D printing is paving the way for the innovative creation of products for the fraction of the cost and the time of traditional manufacturing methods.
