Microsoft has promoted the fact that Windows 8.1 has native support for 3D printers and the company hopes that added feature in the OS will cause 3D printing to become as popular as desktop publishing. Today, the company posted up a new blog and a new video that focuses on one of the leading 3D printer companies, MakerBot.
The video has Microsoft"s Gavin Gear chatting with MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis. The chat has Pettis talking briefly about the history of MakerBot and the products the company has released such as the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer and the new MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, which started shipping just this week.
Pettis also talked about how MakerBot worked with Microsoft on the 3D printer support in Windows 8.1. He states:
Well, we started making friends with the Microsoft teams and we realized we"ve shared the same vision of making it easy for people, a smooth workflow, for people to go from idea to thing. So we worked really closely with (Windows) 8.1 developers to make it so that 3D printing is like 2D printing.
He added that the support for 3D printing in Windows 8.1 is very powerful, but that people should not notice the efforts; they should just simply be able to print a 3D model with a 3D printer. It will be interesting to see if 3D printing takes off in a new direction once PCs with Windows 8.1 installed start being used by MaketBot printer owners.
Source: Microsoft