Earlier in the month the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Microsoft that revealed Microsoft's future 3D manufacturing platform. The invention relates to an operating system configured to enable arbitrary applications to output 3D models to be physically formed by arbitrary 3D manufacturing devices.
Microsoft's Patent Background
Various types of devices such as additive printers, computer numerical control (CNC) mills, laser cutters, photopolymerizers, and others are currently used for 3D manufacturing. Manufacturing systems for these 3D manufacturing devices are typically vertical solutions, meaning content-producing software is generally required to understand and produce the exact printer language that a particular target 3D manufacturing device implements. In other words, content-producing software is often coded to be specific to a particular 3D manufacturing device.
As only the inventors have observed, this tight dependency constrains content-software vendors from producing 3D models that are rich and device-neutral. As only the inventors have observed, this close coupling between 3D manufacturing devices and the software for producing and preparing content also constrains producers of 3D manufacturing devices from innovating. A device maker may not be able to make modify its hardware with improvements due to the need to maintain interoperability with existing content-producing software.
Currently, there is not a systemic mechanism to ensure that users can obtain consistent results when preforming 3D manufacturing, regardless of which content-producing software or 3D manufacturing device is used.
Microsoft Invents 3D Manufacturing Platform
Microsoft's invention generally relates to an operating system configured to enable arbitrary applications to output 3D models to be physically formed by arbitrary 3D manufacturing devices.
The operating system manages the 3D manufacturing devices, including installation of related software, device drivers, device properties, and so forth. The operating system also provides a path or application programming interface (API) through which the arbitrary applications pass arbitrary print jobs (or documents) of 3D models, in a standard format, to the 3D manufacturing devices.
Microsoft notes that the operating system handles queuing and spooling on behalf of the applications and the 3D manufacturing devices. Drivers of the 3D manufacturing devices are managed by the operating system and may translate the 3D models outputted by the applications (in the standard format) to instructions or device-language content that is specific to the respective 3D manufacturing devices.
Microsoft's patent FIG. 1 shown below shows an overview of an operating system #100 serving as an intermediary for 3D manufacturing. The operating system provides various support functions (#102 below) such as a driver framework, print queuing and spooling, bidirectional communication with 3D manufacturing devices and others. The operating system as adapted for 3D manufacturing support, allows any arbitrary application to print 3D content to any arbitrary 3D manufacturing device. That is, the 3D content is decoupled from the 3D manufacturing.
According to Microsoft, a 3D manufacturing device (#104 above) may be any of a variety of devices that add (by deposition, layering, etc.) or remove (by cutting with bits, lasers, high pressure liquid jets, etc.) raw material to form 3D physical objects.
Additive 3D printers and CND mills are two types of 3D manufacturing devices. As mentioned in the Background, other types of 3D manufacturing devices may be used, for instance, photopolymerizers. Some 3D manufacturing devices may not add or remove material but rather may alter or etch the internal content of a solid material using particle beams, lasers, electromagnetic signals, and so forth. Generally, 3D manufacturing devices can produce physical equivalents of arbitrary 3D models, though not all possible 3D models can be manufactured; most 3D manufacturing devices have practical limits that impose constraints or requirements that printable 3D models may meet.
An application (#106 above) can be any type of software running on a computing device. Generally, an application can be any source providing and/or generating 3D model content in any arbitrary form. An application might in some instances be a model authoring application having a user interface (UI) with which a user interacts to build a 3D model, often in some proprietary internal 3D format designed for efficient interactive manipulation and rendering. Computer aided design (CAD) software and modelling or animation software are examples of applications (#106 above) that might use the operating system to print 3D content to a 3D manufacturing device.
An application, when printing via the operating system, outputs its 3D model in a standard 3D print format (described in detail further below) similarly outputted by any of the applications (or other print sources). An application that uses a non-standard 3D format or data structure might translate its 3D model to the standard 3D print format.
In one embodiment, the standard 3D print format is defined by a standard schema that includes a 3D model element (possibly encompassed by a standard package format for packaging multiple files). It may be possible, in some implementations, to extend an existing print schema with definitions for 3D models and related data. When an application is to print to a 3D manufacturing device, the application may export its internal 3D model data (e.g., CAD model data) to the 3D print format specified for use by the operating system, which might be packaged in the standard package format. Such a print package or job containing 3D model content might also include a print ticket or other 3D manufacturing device metadata supplied by the operating system, such as an identifier of a target or destination 3D manufacturing device, information about how the destination 3D manufacturing devices to be configured, print preferences, transformations such as scaling, etc.
To enable an application to select and configure a 3D manufacturing device, the operating system may have facilities or application programming interfaces (APIs) that an application can use to obtain information about any of the 3D manufacturing devices available through the operating system. The operating system may have various conventions for recognizing and managing devices such as printers.
Those conventions may be configured or extended to allow 3D manufacturing devices to be treated as first-class printer objects in the operating system. Thus, any 3D manufacturing device may be managed and used in ways familiar to the user and with consistency across different applications and different 3D manufacturing devices. Such device management and selection may be done through user interfaces provided by the applications (perhaps with common elements provided by the operating system), with device information populated with information obtained through services or components of the operating system.
Device selection and management may also be performed by a user, in a consistent way, by using a printer management user interface (#108) through which any arbitrary 3D manufacturing device might be installed, configured, controlled, and queried for device and/or job information or state. The printer management user interface might also serve as a common point for updating drivers for 3D manufacturing devices, checking for firmware updates (via a network and remote support infrastructure into which the operating system is tied), and so forth. In embodiment, the printer management user interface 108 is also used to manage 2D printers. In sum, a user can manage and use 3D manufacturing devices without concern for the particular devices and software to be employed.
Microsoft's patent FIG. 2 below shows a detailed example of an operating system providing beginning-to-end 3D manufacturing support.
Microsoft originally filed their patent application back in June 2013. Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time.
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