Framing It: 10.29.19

3D printed metal is a lot like wood, Augmented Reality is going gangbusters, Intel gets the lead out, and a webcomic helps you understand what your primate brain can’t.

The Material Science Of Metal 3D Printing

Want to know how metal 3D printing works? Real Engineering produced a great video introducing everyone to the science and techniques behind metal 3D printing:

The takeaways:

• 3D printing is not for mass manufacturing, and that’s because parts print really, really slowly. You knew this already.
• But what about the strength of 3D printed parts? That’s where it gets tricky. Because of the way metal 3D prints are constructed, there’s a ‘grain’ to the resulting print. This can be reduced by the pattern of how each layer is constructed, but every metal 3D printed part will be weaker than the same part machined out of a block.

Augmented Reality Is Now Go

• Apple is releasing AR glasses, possibly early next year. These glasses will project an image into the user’s eye, and be what Google Glass could have been.
• Also in AR, Tilt Five, Jeri Ellsworth’s effort to bring holographic gaming to the table top, finished its Kickstarter with a bit more than $1.7 Million dollars. This brings it into the realm of one of the most funded hardware projects up there with Pebble, the Coolest Cooler, and the Ouya. Let’s hope that’s the only similarity between Tilt Five and those other projects.

What’s All This About Quantum Computing?

• Google announced quantum supremacy, and IBM said no, you can still do that on a really big computer. What does all this mean? Don’t worry, it’s all summarized in a web comic.
• This specific web comic was written by Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, and he’s got a great blog.
• But that quantum stuff? Don’t worry, it’s all interference patterns and your primitive monkey brain can’t comprehend it. I’m really trying for a Quantum of Solace joke here, but I can’t place it.

Intel’s Finally At 10nm

• Intel is finally at 10nm, and they’re shipping 10nm chips to OEMs.
• Intel is on track to launch 7nm chips — specifically a GPU for the datacenter — sometime in 2021.
• But Samsung and TSMC are already at 7nm, and they have been for a while. TSMC is actually at 5nm (although this is marketing speak and not referencing an actual size or anything) and producing chips with an unbelievable transistor density.