New customizable applications for 3D printing are emerging daily and new businesses are constantly forming around these applications. Whether it’s 3D selfies, 3D printed urns of your deceased loved ones, customized 3D printed jewelry or 3D prints of your beloved pets, the technology is taking customization to the next level.
Yet another incredibly clever and new application for 3D printing has been unveiled today, coming out of Japan. A company called Ringpet wants to transform a few simple photographs of your pet into a piece of full-color jewelry which you can wear wherever you go to remind yourself that you have a furry (or perhaps feathery, shelly, or scaly) friend waiting at home anxiously for your return.
“Today, we launch a brand new service called Ringpet. It is such a unique and fun service in which we produce a made to order customized ring of your pet, thanks to full-color 3D printing,” Yoshinobu Kakumura, founder of Ringpet, explained to us.
The process is rather simple. Customers register on the Ringpet website and upload a few photographs of their pet taken from various angles–then the team at Ringpet does all the rest. From the photos, the company stitches together a 3D model of your pet before printing it out in full color using an SLS powderbed 3D printer.
Because the first ring takes a lot more effort and time to produce than any additional duplicates of the same ring, the pricing structure is a bit unique. The first ring of your pet ordered will cost 12,960 Japanese Yen (around $105). Each additional ring will then fall in price to just 6,480 Yen (around $53), as the design work and model creation has already been completed at this point. The company claims that orders will take approximately 1 month to process and ship out, so don’t expect to instantly be gratified with the ability to take your little friend wherever you go.
Ringpet is a subsidiary of 3DWave, an Ageo, Japan-based 3D print media site and creative agency which looks to invent fun and exciting ways to use virtual reality and 3D printing. In the past they have offered services to print pet figurines, and according to the company their website 3DWave.net receives over 50,000 page views per day.
Certainly this is an innovative idea, one which strays from the usual figurine business model we have been watching take off over the last year or two. Whether there are enough pet owners out there who really want to wear a ring of their pet’s face is yet to be seen, but Ringpet deserves recognition for their outside-the-box thinking for sure.
Let us know if you’ve ordered one of these cute little products. How did it turn out? Post your feedback and images of your ring in the Ringpet forum thread on 3DPB.com.
