While it can be fun to take something--a game like Minecraft or an app like Let's Create! Pottery--and build something using that framework, the overall effect can be relaxing, even fun, but sometimes can leave the user feeling a little depressed, knowing that the result of all that hard work will never be seen off a television or other monitor screen. Infinite Dreams--the makers of Let's Create! Pottery--and Sculpteo, a 3D printing company, are bringing the virtual-only creations of pottery on Let's Create! Pottery to real life.

Let's Create! Pottery is pretty much exactly what it says it is on the box. Users get a simulation involving clay, a pottery wheel, and a series of other tools related to pottery, whereupon the users can construct various pottery objects in a 3D representation. Not bad, but not exactly as fulfilling as having a pot or vase or whatever created from actual clay on an actual wheel, though much less expensive than picking these objects up. However, with the addition of Sculpteo, an online 3D printing service based in France, that's about to change.

Thanks to Sculpteo, the objects in question can be sent from the Let's Create! Pottery application \ to Sculpteo, who will then run the results of the application through a 3D printing system and actually create the designs generated in Let's Create! Pottery in a tangible form that can be placed on display on any shelf in the house. Payment for the items can be conducted via several methods, including PayPal (News - Alert), credit card, or straight bank transfer, with most items able to be shipped in just two days. Better yet, users can even share their designs from Let's Create! Pottery, allowing other users to take note of the designs and get their very own version from Sculpteo.

While there's not necessarily a lot of practical value in such a thing--it's really just a tchotchke generator--it does show the value of the overall concept of 3D printing. The further the technology advances, the clearer it becomes that this may well be the way in which people in the future--maybe five years from now, maybe 20--get the products they want. Consider what this will do to the children's toy market, for example, with users able to print their own sets of Legos, or able to print their own action figures of popular cartoon lines. What value is there in going down to the store to buy a ceramic vase when, for less money, users can have a plastic vase they designed themselves on their own computers printed for them on a 3D printer? Sculpteo is even doing something similar with 3D creature models right now.

This technology could prove very destabilizing to the market as a whole, and may well represent a major sea change in the way users purchase things.