State of the Industry
Printing Toys As 3-D printers gain traction in households across the country, toy manufacturers must find a way to protect their intellectual property. by Howard N. Aronson
F
rom wooden blocks and erector sets to Lincoln Logs and model airplanes, kids love building toys. But now, kids are not only building with toys— they’re printing the toys with which to build. The kid next door may be infringing your intellectual property (IP) by printing your copyrighted toy product on a 3-D printer, or he or she could be using your copyrighted design under license. Toy companies will have to decide how to protect their IP rights before 3-D printers become ubiquitous. Recently coming into widespread use, 3-D printers now print human and animal body parts (bioprinting), replacement mechanical parts, guns, and toys. A 3-D printer will soon orbit the Earth, making parts for the Interna tional Space Station. Large, commercial 3-D printers often produce prototypes. Mattel, for example, which used to sculpt its prototypes from wax, now uses dozens of printers to manufacture parts not only for prototypes, but also for Barbie and other dolls, according to The Wall Street Journal. One toy designer estimates that the transition to 3-D rapid
“Kids are not only building with toys— they’re printing the toys with which to build.”
FEBRUARY 2014
prototyping has cut development time from a year to just three months. Disney researchers, according to a BBC report, say that creating toys on 3-D printers has allowed them to create a prototype in minutes, instead of the amount of time it takes for a factory to be retooled. The 3D printers have another huge advantage: They provide a level of accuracy that would be too costly and complicated using traditional manufacturing techniques.
Let There Be Lights The BBC explains how Disney explores the use of 3D printers to build new kinds of light features into its toys, including light pipes and tubes of enclosed air that glow. Another Disney design uses hollow tubes at a toy’s center. When illuminated, the toy’s “heart” appears to be beating. Disney also created a glow-eyed bug figure item, chess pieces that display their position on the board, and plastic blocks in which light is used to make the blocks appear to explode inside. 3-D printers can also make entire toys. A Disney research paper predicted “a future world where interactive devices can be printed rather than assembled [where] … a device with active components is created as a single object, rather than a case enclosing circuit boards and individual assembled parts.” One toy designer has a hybrid manufacturing model for a building set: injection molding for the core chassis parts, and on-demand 3-D printing for accessories. continued on page 246
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