Aviral Singh has been working with multinational banking corporations and the software industry. He has been with great organizations like Credit Suisse, Barclays and Citi.

MUDIT JAIN:  So, you are not quite a new entrant and you’ve been trying different things, experimenting 3d printers. What makes you interested in, how did you start it with this?

AVIRAL SINGH:  From an industry 4.0 perspective, I got interested in it about four years ago when I read about what 3d printing was and what 3d printing was doing and Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have been growing on their own and including IoT. And I’ve been trying to follow what’s happening in the space for a while. And December last year was when just fortuitously in a conversation with a friend, we started talking about 3d printing and his wife happened to be a printer engineer. And the conversation started from there. And then I just got a 3d printer, earlier this year and started to play around with it. And, and it’s been very exciting because reading about 3d printing and doing 3d printing, as I’m sure, are two very different things.

So, getting a printer and then starting to experiment with various things, it has really caught my attention and I have absolutely no intention of stopping. So, I hope that gave you kind of a background of what is driving me to the side.

MUDIT JAIN:  I’m sure there are multiple applications 3d printers connected with IoT, multiple apps. That’s also going to go, have you tried to experiment in that area as well?

AVIRAL SINGH:  I’m starting to think about that, but what’s very interesting is if you look at the market today and what’s happening, 3d printing is an area where things are changing. Sometimes it feels like on an hourly basis, but if you look at the materials coming out, if you look at the techniques coming out, post-production techniques coming out, and one of the things that has happened, is, somebody released a full suite of software to manage, I think up to 40 printers at a time. So those things are already out there. And if you look at, how 3d printing will really work in the future, if you look at least from an industrial perspective, you have to integrate it with the floor management software of the firms. Because if you can’t do 3d printing on demand, which automatically starts things, monitors things, finishes things, takes it off the better place, so you can do your next a bill. That’s going to be very difficult to manage. So, I think the automation piece that you’re talking about, which will include everything from, IoT to monitoring, to control systems around 3d printer are going to be very important. And at the same time, if we don’t look at the AR and VR technologies from a variety of perspectives, in my opinion, AR, is going to be critical in terms of making sure that the models are appropriate for whatever we are trying to do. And VR, is going to be critical in terms of doing the modelling, right? Making sure the models look fine by themselves. And if you’re going to take something which is in the virtual world, which are our models and make it real right, then we have to go for those steps.

MUDIT JAIN:   We have virtual reality augmenting, which are capable of creating a material product just from the view of it and directly into 3d printer.

So, you touched upon that, that doing 3d printing and knowing and reading about 3d printing is completely different.

Especially when we start, we started FDM printing That’s very tough, or very critical because we often fail and patience plays a critical role. Do you want to share a few of the learnings in the early days?

AVIRAL SINGH:  FGM is awesome, but one of the things is it’s also slow.

A few other things, I think especially the hoppy printers. When you first get them, a hobby printer out of the box and an upgraded hobby printer are two completely different printers. So, for me, just that do-it-yourself thing has allowed me to understand how this thing actually works and you realize it’s not magic, but it’s absolutely brilliant in terms of everything that has been done over the past 20 or so years with an FDM world to make it happen. And to me, even more than just the printing has been the understanding of what printing can do for us and some of the conversations that I’ve been having.

There’s another conversation I was having with somebody who is starting, a company to make devices for people with disabilities and the first product they were thinking of doing an advanced wheelchair. So how did they prototype it? 3d printing with carbon fiber. I’ve had conversations with people and the people trying to work on the reduction of carbon emissions and net-zero. Without decentralized manufacturing that isn’t happening. If you look at the transportation industry, I think that’s going to be severely affected by this. After the supply chain disruption of last year in 2020, the US did a week-long exercise of what they would do if that happened again. And the whole basis of that was the existing 3d printing infrastructure in the US and while they haven’t made the results completely public, the part that was public while they found two or three things, which they need to improve on the whole, it seems to be working and they’re pretty comfortable.

MUDIT JAIN:   Exactly. And, you touched about the medical, so that’s a massive field. Surgery planning is a very good upcoming field in India. And in India, we have been quite behind the US and other European countries, but, there’s the company, which is doing surgery planning on demand for if a hospital has to do a surgery. They just give them a call and they do on-demand printing for them and there are many services.

And also, we didn’t know that most of the jewellery and exotic designs are mostly 3d printed first and then it’s casted. So, coming back to, this 3d printing and the contribution to the industry, how are you seeing that you will be contributing to the 3d printing industry because you have garnered a lot of experience and knowledge in 3d printing.

AVIRAL SINGH:  I’ve been doing this for about six to seven months. So, my knowledge is very limited. And I don’t know how much I’ll actually end up contributing, but there’s a couple of things which I am going to do. One of the beliefs that I have is that we need to make this much more natural and spread the knowledge. So as an example, before I started 3d printing, I realized I need to learn 3d design.

One of the things that I want to start doing and fairly soon actually is start holding classes for school students around 3d design and 3d printing, right. Prepare some light course material and handle that on a regular basis, get people excited about it. And the second objective that I have at this point is just talk to as many people as possible, because when you talk about jewellery, I talked to a couple of jewellers, right? I talked to dentists, in fact, one of the areas which blew my mind was hearing aids, right? The number of hearing aids, pretty much all of them are made because they need to be customized to the shape of your ear. Right? And I think just talking to people, gives people ideas as to what can be done and that’s something I intend to do. The one thing we really need to figure out is how we can do get 3d scanning to become more egalitarian and accessible. The moment we can do that, I think 3d printing will follow in suite.

MUDIT JAIN:  And you touched a very good point of, because I know the person I was talking about, my friend who runs the startup, he also is the similar kind of guy who do not know design, but he’s having a full-fledged, 3D printers, army over them. We get designs, obviously custom designs have to be made, but we get so many ideas. So, we have to share some of the products or some of the articles feature of 3d printed, which are some cool stuffs just to know what we are printing.

So started with an idea to have this community or the 3d culture part. The name culture comes from that idea. Then, I was speaking to one of our associates to Vivek that 3d printing and its application. So, my idea was that I have a vacuum cleaner at home, and it’s an actual story. But the nozzles of that vacuum cleaner, they’re all gone. I do not have the nozzles, but I have a convenience, but can I 3d print the nozzles? Yes, I did. I just took the sizes and I have vacuum cleaner nozzles without spending money outside. And as, just to say that you handled one part and you have a part for your light fixtures, that’s the real 2d printing utility. And that has to come to the masses. I think we are not there yet.

We need to create that culture. And that’s like 3d printing has so much of a scope. And you talked about that printing place. So, removing or reducing the carbon footprint. So obviously like automobile workshops, and those are the requirement. That’s the real case we see quite often.

I have a last question for you and, quite a common one, like what do you advise to the people who are starting in 3d printing, each painting or designing, or just for hobbying, doing both or any one of them. And also, the small entrepreneurs who wants to start something into 3d printing.

AVIRAL SINGH:  The advice I’m going to give is my learning. So, in my opinion, if you start it up as a business, you’re going to have issues. You’ve got to first start it up as a hobby, because if you don’t enjoy it, it’s going to be a problem. Because 3d printing is not really plug and play today. Even the most expensive machines, right? While they advertise plugin plan may be much more plug and play than the hobby machines. They’re still not plug and play. So, until you enjoy it and understand what actually goes into it and how it happens, if you’re not going to have fun, then you’re not going to progress very easily. So, the one thing is that don’t get disheartened. The market doesn’t exist today, but it will.

Five years from today. I think there’s going to be a huge market. So, riding that wave from the technology being there and no market to the technology, being there on a huge market is I think going to be incredible for anybody who really joins the bandwagon.

MUDIT JAIN:   Absolutely. If you look at the technology, it’s nothing. I mean, I talk about how one of the person by whom I got introduced to 3d printing, and he talked about it, he started with saying that I am a robotic engineer and I wanted to build some parts for my robots, but I was not able to customize them. And that’s where he bought the 3d printers. Eventually, he reverse-engineered the 3d printer and he said that this is nothing but a robotic arm, which creates up a particle on a product layer by layer. So, he created his own 3d printer, and he’s now having a good business in India, manufacturing 3d printers. And he has been into the industry for the last eight years. And still, he says that the market is nothing today, just as it does now. So, we do believe the market is going to explode. And I am talking about the COVID. You also talked about the COVID days. There have been many talks about 3d printing. This guy actually created the face shields, 3d printed on order from multiple government organizations. And that was a great use case in this and a very quick turnaround. So definitely 3d printing is going to be a key player in manufacturing and service. And also, the bespoke industry, I think, as you were saying that the customization will be key. The Paralympics had 3d printed, which are products for the athletes. I think it’s going to be a great journey.

Thank you very much. And definitely, we’ll be talking much more in the future course and definitely looking forward to having your more talks and more products out into 3d. Thanks a lot for your time today.