Authorised Partner
3D Printing for Consumer Technology
Accelerate Innovation to Bring the Consumer Technology Products of the Future to Market Now
Consumer technology has become prolific in our everyday lives, spurring a revolution from devices for smart homes to connected wearables. To differentiate your company in this extremely competitive industry, you need to bring groundbreaking products to market faster and constantly create unique customer experiences that deliver value. This level of consumer demand drives the need for design flexibility, prototype performance, rapid iteration, supply chain continuity, sustainable solutions, and operational productivity from prototyping to bridge production and mass customization.
3D Systems’ consultative approach and 3D printing solutions can give you a competitive advantage to meet these challenges. With a dedicated team of experts and decades of industry experience, we collaborate with you on application development and leverage the largest suite of additive manufacturing solutions in the industry to meet your specific needs.
3D printing solutions can address prototyping and low-volume production needs for a vast array of new and emerging consumer technologies. This can range from virtual and augmented reality, to enter the immersive online environment of the metaverse, to smart homes, IoT, AI, 5G, connected wearables, computers, and other consumer electronics.
10x
faster product development
500K+
production parts on our printers every day
130+
high-performance materials
3D Printing Applications for Consumer Technology
Blur the Line Between Prototyping and Pre-Series Production
Technological innovations create new opportunities to deliver unique consumer experiences, yet they can also present daunting engineering challenges for quality, accuracy, and lead-time.
Our 3D printing solutions eliminate tooling costs and lead-times for housings and covers, and deliver end-use parts with the desired quality, accuracy, and mechanical properties. Our consultants can help you in the entire process, from application development and optimizing part performance, to streamlining your prototyping to production workflows, making them faster and more efficient.
Solving Housings and Covers Challenges with 3D Printing
Rapid Order Fulfillment
With 3D Systems’ solutions capable of 3D printing prototypes in less than 24 hours, OEMs can optimize their workflow to reduce the time between design iterations, enabling rapid order fulfillment and faster time-to-market. By eliminating the need for tooling, our additive manufacturing solutions reduce the duration of this process from weeks to hours, helping to save costs and improve quality. Further, in-house production guarantees part delivery for a streamlined supply chain.
End-Use Performance
Accuracy, precision, and mechanical properties are critical factors for end-use components and product validation. Truly functional 3D printed prototypes enable faster real-world product development and validation to take place before costly investments in production tooling. These realistic prototypes can replicate the final production product, in appearance and function, including mechanical characteristics, quality, performance, and optimized ergonomics.
Aesthetic Finishing
Materials come in a range of colors from opaque blacks and whites to clear, and print with exceptional surface quality, similar to injection molding. 3D textures can also be digitally added to minimize downstream finishing requirements and accurately represent end-use parts. Materials are compatible with plating or painting for premium aesthetics.
Operational Productivity
Our end-to-end additive manufacturing solutions are designed to deliver industry-leading quality, reliability, and productivity to keep your operation running efficiently for high-volume production of prototypes, bridge manufacturing, and mass customization. Maximized uptime, reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, and minimized waste contribute to a lower cost per part and high manufacturing yield.
Mass Customization
Designing and building customized components like housings and covers is part of creating next-generation consumer technology products. Tailoring these to the consumer can be costly with conventional methods. We facilitate mass-customization by giving engineers precise control over each component, to create a unique customer experience, with the capability to scale.
Seals and Gaskets for Perfect Fit
Creating seal and gasket prototypes for testing and end-use validation is critical to ensure the perfect fit of your consumer products, but they can be time consuming and expensive to produce with conventional methods.
Our 3D Printing solutions offer the ability of rapid design iteration and prototyping of these complex components. Both through eggshell molding for 100% silicone components, a fast and cost-effective alternative to injection molding, or direct 3D printing of chemical resistant and biocompatible elastomers.
Solving Soft Material Components Prototyping Challenges with 3D Printing
Rapid Design Iteration
With 3D Systems’ solutions capable of 3D printing prototypes in less than 24 hours, OEMs can optimize their workflow to reduce the time between design iterations, enabling rapid order fulfillment and faster time-to-market. Digital eggshell molding allows you to get true silicone parts in as fast as 24 hours. For the fastest turnaround, biocompatible and chemical-resistant elastomeric components can be directly 3D printed in minutes.
End-Use Performance
Accuracy, precision, and mechanical properties are critical factors for product validation and end-use components. Achieve production performance with both digital eggshell molding and direct 3D printing, as they offer pristine surface quality, texturing capability, detail fidelity, and exceptional accuracy.
Best-In-Class Material Properties
To validate your design, digital eggshell molding is compatible with most standard silicones, both tin and platinum based. Our elastomeric materials for 3D printing have excellent tear-resistance for form and fit testing. Further, they are biocompatible and have chemical resistance to hydrocarbons and cleaning chemicals (tested for sealed and surface contact compatibility per ASTM D543 and USCAR2).
Operational Productivity
Our end-to-end additive manufacturing solutions are designed to deliver industry-leading quality, reliability, and productivity to keep your operation running efficiently for high-volume production of prototypes, bridge manufacturing, and mass customization. Maximized uptime, reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, and minimized waste contribute to a lower cost per part and high manufacturing yield.
Same-Day Prototypes for Customer Validation
Creating prototypes for testing and end-use validation is critical to ensure the perfect fit of your wearable products, but they can be time consuming and expensive to produce with conventional methods.
Our 3D Printing solutions enable rapid design iteration and evaluation of these complex components, delivering functional prototypes with the look, feel, quality, and mechanical properties of the final product.
Solving Wearable Components Needs with 3D Printing
Rapid Order Fulfillment
With 3D Systems’ solutions capable of 3D printing prototypes in less than 24 hours, OEMs can optimize their workflow to reduce the time between design iterations, enabling rapid order fulfillment and faster time-to-market. By eliminating the need for tooling, our additive manufacturing solutions reduce the duration of this process from weeks to hours, helping to save costs and improve quality. Further, in-house production guarantees part delivery for a streamlined supply chain.
End-Use Performance
Accuracy, precision, and mechanical properties are critical factors for end-use components and product validation. Truly functional 3D printed prototypes enable faster real-world product development and validation to take place before costly investments in production tooling. These realistic prototypes can replicate the final production product, in appearance and function, including mechanical characteristics, quality, performance, and optimized ergonomics.
Best-In-Class Material Properties
Validating design for wearables requires customer try-ons, therefore biocompatible materials. We offer a range of durable, flexible, and high tear-strength elastomeric materials that are capable of meeting ISO 10993-10 testing requirements for irritation and skin sensitization. Feel confident moving forward with long-term user testing with materials that are UV- and chemical-resistant.
Aesthetic Finishing
Materials come in a range of colors from opaque blacks and whites to clear, and print with exceptional surface quality, similar to injection molding. 3D textures can also be digitally added to minimize downstream finishing requirements and accurately represent end-use parts. Materials are compatible with plating or painting for premium aesthetics.
Operational Productivity
Our end-to-end additive manufacturing solutions are designed to deliver industry-leading quality, reliability, and productivity to keep your operation running efficiently for high-volume production of prototypes, bridge manufacturing, and mass customization. Maximized uptime, reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, and minimized waste contribute to a lower cost per part and high manufacturing yield.
Mass Customization
Designing and building customized wearable components is part of creating next-generation consumer technology products. Tailoring these to the consumer can be costly with conventional methods. We facilitate mass-customization by giving engineers precise control over each component, to create a unique customer experience, with the capability to scale.
3D Printing Solutions that Accelerate Innovation
Complete Solutions Portfolio
Our hardware, software, materials, post-processing, and manufacturing operating system (MOS) solutions offer unprecedented speed, quality, design flexibility, economics, and product reliability. 3D Systems offers the largest suite of additive manufacturing solutions for small to extra-large housings and covers, consistently delivering exceptional smooth surface finish, accuracy, fine detail resolution and repeatability in a user-friendly end-to-end process.
Production-Grade Materials
Our 3D printing materials address the widest variety of applications and performance characteristics in additive manufacturing to offer a range of features that are critical to prototyping and production for consumer technology products. Our broad portfolio of materials for housings and covers extends from selective laser sintering production plastics, like PA 12, to true production-grade photopolymers with long-term stability, biocompatibility, flame retardance, chemical and thermal resistance, electrostatic discharge (ESD) properties, and more.
Application Development
Through our Application Innovation Group, we leverage years of consumer technology and additive manufacturing expertise to help you solve your most difficult design and production challenges with optimized 3D printing solutions. We provide you with application support, from advanced concept development to bridge production and mass customization.
World-Class Service Support
From installation to hands-on training and consulting support, 3D Systems’ experts enable you to quickly and effectively ramp up your operation. To maximize your uptime and keep your fleet running efficiently, our world-class service organization is equipped to meet your business needs with on-call experts, field engineering services, preventive maintenance programs, and optimized equipment for high serviceability.