There is a moment in the Kickstarter video for the 3Doodle pen (which I found via the New Scientist's Paul Marks) which took my breath away. It comes after the introduction, when the pen is used to draw its own logo; and it is as simple as drawing a cube.

Only… it draws all of the cube:

The pen is essentially a handheld 3D printer. By extruding heated plastic through the nib, which then cools solid almost instantly, it lets users "write" in thin air, creating anything from relatively simple stick figures:

To insanely complex wire art:

(The 3Doodle team have joined forces with a bunch of Etsy wire-artists to show off the pen. The work above is by Ruth Jensen.)

On one level, the pen is clearly "just" a $75 toy. A few artists might find use for it (but then, artists find uses for anything), and it looks like it would be amazing fun to just goof around with, but it is difficult to imagine it revolutionising anything. And I'm pretty sure the launch-to-penis time (the time it takes for a radical new creative technology to be used to make crudely-drawn cocks) will be in the microseconds.

At the same time, though, it's a demonstration of just how close-to-market mainstream 3D printing is. The over-arching technology behind the 3Doodle genuinely does have the potential to shake up manufacturing — if not by letting people print consumer goods at home, the utopian dream, then at least by radically restructuring supply chains in conventional production.

The pen is currently less than $1000 short of its $30,000 goal on Kickstarter. I really want one.