Theo Jansen is an artist who makes wild animated, wind-powered robots that seem to have a life of their own. Once you set them up on a beach and let them go, they undulate, slide, and coil across the sand like some sort of steampunk gazelle.

3D printing service Shapeways is now offering two Jansen designs for sale, including a propellor-powered motor for getting your beest to move.

You can purchased the pre-printed beests for about $100 and the propeller add-on for $40. They are about six inches long. Jansen will update the designs as he perfects his larger beests and upload them as they change.

You can pick up your own beest here but sadly I can’t find a 3D file so you can print your own at home.

3D printing service Shapeways is useful for everything from unprecedented puzzle construction to werewolf hunting. But this time they’ve really outdone themselves.

You might remember the Strandbeests, a set of sculptures/machines that “walk” under their own power due to clever design by their creator, Theo Jansen. The originals were large and hand-made from light wood so they could move easily — but Jansen collaborated with Shapeways to put together a version that they can just print.

It won’t go in wind, of course, but you can see how it moves when pulled by a string in this video. Simultaneously creepy and amazing. They call it Animaris Geneticus Parvus, and you can order one (fully formed! No assembly required!) for around a hundred bucks.

Isn’t it just shocking how cool of a world we live in?

So, you’re a big Rubik’s cube buff. Can solve any cube in five minutes, think people who can’t are fools? Well, sounds like you need a new challenge. How about this 17x17x17 puzzle cube by puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer, and printed using Shapeways? Should keep you busy for a few years.

Too bad it costs two thousand dollars, whaaat!

Are you getting a bum quote from your local silversmith for the creation of a silver knuckle duster? Me too. They just don’t understand the importance of protecting ourselves from the lycanthropic scourge. Now, however, you can get together with a 3D modeler friend and make some sweet silver accessories for those terrifying full-moon melees.

Yes, Silver is the latest material to be supported by fabrication site Shapeways. Steel is, of course, more practical for blades and brass gets a really nice patina, but when it comes to wolfmen, there’s really only one material you want to work with, and that’s silver.

Unfortunately they don’t use consecrated metal, so this is useless against ghosts, ghouls, rogue elvish, and bugbears, but let’s be honest, if you don’t have holy water around the house to dip your tools in, you probably shouldn’t be engaging in war with the sorcerous and undead to begin with.

More details about pricing and design rules can be found at the Shapeways blog.

I’ve been exchanging emails with a number of these entrepreneurs about their products, asking them all the same questions: how and why? All of them are building something that someone wants: not a one of these folks is trying to create a market where no demand exists. Many of them are also trying hard to democratize the entire purchasing process, and working to undo the homogenization of mass-produced products.

Think for a moment how subtle customization is a part of your every day life. Movies on demand at Netflix allow you to watch what you want to watch, not what the programming director at some cable channel feels like airing. You can put together specific playlists of only songs you actually want to hear, instead of what the radio broadcasts. You can order that Big Mac without onions, and get a shake instead of a soda with your value meal. Your computer is customized, your iPod is the color you want it and connected to the headphones you like the best, and on and on. How many of your decisions every day are the result of your specific decision to customize the things around you? And yet, you buy your clothes off a rack…

No better example of the problem of homogenization exists than clothing. Factories churn out millions of garments every day, all in the “standard” sizes in order to maximize profit while minimizing cost and effort. But really, how well do the standard sizes fit you? I’m a tall, lean fellow, so XL is just a shade too small and XXL is too baggy. We’ve all grown up accustomed to poorly fitting garments. Not everyone has the means to connect with a tailor to get really good fitting clothing, and others see it as an expense that can’t be justified: we’ll just live with the standard sizes and make peace with the fact that our sleeves are a little too short and the collar a little too tight.

So it’s little surprise that three of the entrepreneurs with whom I’ve communicated are working to make custom-fitted clothing easier to design and purchase. Danny Wong of Blank Label tells me that Blank Label started as a pretty traditional custom tailor shop: they’d come to your office, measure you up, show you a book of swatches, and worked up a dress shirt or suit for you. Eager to try something new, but still leveraging their existing supply chain, they embarked on the design-it-yourself path. Wong observes that demand for customization permeates our everyday lives:

One big factor is a shift in consumer demand. With products and services like iTunes and Pandora where you pick and choose your own music, BK’s “have it your way” motto, Build-a-Bear’s create-your-own teddy bears, consumers are hungry to get product personally made for them and designed by them.

Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang from ShirtsMyWay quickly came to the obvious conclusion that they “could bring it up to another level with the internet”:

There is the whole aspect of being able to design your own shirts and preview which wouldn’t be possible in the offline world. It is also convenient for customers to get their shirts delivered to their door and then when they need new shirts they’ll just go in and order more and get the same great fit.

I asked Seph Skerritt of Proper Cloth if dress shirts were an intentional decision for him, or if it came as the result of an iterative process:

Yes, we specifically set out to do shirts. It did not evolve that way.

I like the dress shirt category because I believe finding a good fitting dress shirt off-the-rack is difficult for a lot of people. Technically, it’s easy to understand why. Dress shirts have several fit-points that are all critical (collar size, sleeve length, chest/waist size, length). If the sleeves are an inch too long or too short, it will be noticeable and if the collar is too tight, you’ll be very uncomfortable. Furthermore, dress shirts are made from woven cotton with little stretch, leaving little room for error. The result is that standardized sizes (small, medium, large, etc) frequently do not meet customer’s demands. With more tailored/fitted looks in fashion, this becomes even more of an issue. With the growth of e-commerce and improvements in manufacturing/supply chain capabilities, I think there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt the established industry with a made-to-order business model.

An interesting twist on customized clothing comes from Nicholas Marx of Bespokeable, currently in closed beta: a marketplace for customized products backed by a recommendation engine. Bespokeable is currently focusing on clothing, but they have plans to expand to other customized goods.

I did specifically set out to build the recommendation engine that powers the personal outfitting service. However, the idea to turn over the production to actual tailors and build a marketplace was indeed the result of an iterative process. The original idea of Bespokeable was actually a clothing line. In a nutshell, we’re zigging, where everyone else is zagging.

The Bespokeable recommendation engine, according to Marx, will benefit both buyers and sellers:

We take certain data from the buyers such as their hair, eye, & skin color (amongst others) to be used to recommend certain fabrics that will look best with each person. We think that it’s this dedicated focus on personalization that will make the buyers want to use Bespokeable’s market. Bespokeable’s system also gets better for buyers each time they uses it. When someone buy something on Bespokeable, we use that data to recommend future items to that same person as well as to other people who are like that person. This actually acts as an incentive for the buyers to go through Bespokeable, which in turn is an incentive for the sellers to stay on our system…

Certainly there’s a price premium imposed on customized clothes. But the old adage “you get what you pay for” may never have been more appropriate. You can pay a little for mass-produced goods made from cheap materials and assembled as quickly as possible; or you can pay a bit more for a quality garment that’s made from good material by a real human being with an eye for detail. Marx opines about the future of craftsmanship and customization:

It’s also worth noting that it’s independent craftsmen who are best suited to meet the increase in demand for one-off products, not large factories that are designed for mass-production. If you think about it, the clothing industry hasn’t really changed since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps this “customized micro-production revolution” will be the Second Industrial Revolution.

The trend toward customization extends far beyond custom clothing, though. In addition to Chocri for custom chocolates, there’s also Chocomize, founded by Eric Heinbockel, Nick LaCava, and Fabian Kaempfer. Customized chocolate was a ripe opportunity for business because, according to their research, chocolate is a relatively recession-proof luxury good and customers were becoming increasingly demanding when selecting premium chocolates. Despite America’s sweet tooth, there are still some hurdles for Chocomize and its peers to overcome.

The biggest challenge that we see in this space is simply that Americans are still unfamiliar with the concept of co-creation on this scale. Americans take for granted that their computers are customizable or their cars are customizable during the shopping process but they are unaware of the ability to customize other, smaller purchases particularly food. While we have been very successful at getting our own brand name out through national outlets like Oprah Magazine, the Costco Connection, or Reuters our companies have to both educate consumers about the co-creation process and then educate the consumer about the specific brand.

A bit more discussion with other entrepreneurs in the customization space confirms that it’s still focused largely on luxury goods, or higher-end products. For example, Brad Lindenberg is pushing customized golf clubs at his site Lind Golf. You don’t need golf clubs, in, say, the same way you do need decent clothing, so Lind Golf is targeting dedicated golfers. Visitors can get a perfectly fitted golf club for their height and swing, and now have it laser etched for more visible personalization.

We manufacture our golf shafts, grips and ferrules in 9 different colors and offer over 20 shaft and grip upgrade options to customers (allowing for over 50 million possible combinations of clubs). The internet model means we can stock all our equipment in component form and assemble our gear only when an order comes in. This means we can make a club in left hand, minus 1/2 inch with a red shaft, black grip and red club head and ship it out the very next day. A retail store cannot offer this level of customization and turn it around so quickly.

I’m not a golfer, but the golfers I know do take their activity pretty seriously. If you’re going to spend the time and money to play with any regularity, I’d assume you’d want equipment that was comfortable to use and performed well. Customization of clubs pretty obviously addresses that.

There are, of course, lots of other sites offering lots of unique customized luxury products. We’ve covered Shapeways, the customized fabrication shop, a number of times before, and they keep rolling out new products and new materials. There’s also Fluid Forms where you can create customized belt buckles, streetmap clocks, and more. All of these are things to enhance your home or to make a really unique gift, rather than address commodity needs.

Rounding out the entrepreneurs with whom I spoke is Arwa Jumkawala, creator of Gemkitty, where you can design customized jewelry for that special someone in your life.

There’s always been custom work in fine jewelry, but it tends to get very expensive, difficult, and time consuming. Having been in the gem and jewelry trade my whole life, I thought there was a huge opportunity to take that process, democratize it, and just make it easier.

Gemkitty launched last fall, and while they don’t have a lot of repeat business yet, Jumkawala tells me they’ve also not yet had any returns of their products, which I think is a real testament to the quality of their creations, and how meaningful it is to the recipient.

One of the most interesting things, to me, to learn from these discussions about customization is the level of fraternization amongst many of the people in this space. Several of the folks quoted in this piece contacted me on their own and helpfully included in their opening emails links to their peers doing customization in other areas. Certainly there’s a level of competition — Blank Label, Proper Cloth and ShirtsMyWay are all courting the same clients, basically — but they’re all cognizant of this fact, and speak highly of one another. Each feels confident that they can compete on their own and remain relevant in this burgeoning aspect of e-commerce. ShirtsMyWay is touting their seven trillion combinations, but their products are made in Asia; while Proper Cloth makes all of their shirts in the U.S., which may be an important consideration for some shoppers.

In some ways, a lot of these customization offerings are the logical progression of e-commerce, and we can likely expect a growing ecosystem of customized products available for purchase. Clothing and jewelry and golf clubs all make sense to personalize. Will we ever be able to design our own toilet paper patterns, or screwdriver handles, or silverware? Would we ever need to?

The marriage of printing and origami techniques allows for greater structural complexity – such as the crane’s overhanging wings, a feature not producible by direct printing methods alone. In addition, Lewis’ team can print sheets with a variety of patterns, adding yet another level of architectural detail.

Via EurekAlert.

First, the press info:

Innovation Takes the Stage with Metal 3D printing for modelers and creatives
Shapeways offers 3D Printing in Stainless Steel

SIGGRAPH (August 4, 2009) — Many 3D modelers have found their way to Shapeways to bring their personal designs to life by using 3D printing. Until now the materials were limited to different kind of polymers. Today Shapeways becomes the world’s first company offering 3D printing in stainless steel for everyone.

Technique
This is a completely new technique which deposits stainless steel powder in a very thin layer, combining it with a binding material. Printed objects are built up like this, layer by layer, gradually creating the form just as you designed it on the computer screen. When complete, they are infused with bronze and cured in an oven. After cooling, the models can be left in the original steel finish or tumbled to get a great polished look.

So, as you see, the objects aren’t carved in steel like Terminator parts. Instead they are made of layered steel powder. This would allow you to build heavy-duty items including jewelery and, dare I say it, car parts. The possibilities, in a sense, are endless.

That said we’re proud to announce that one lucky commenter will receive a stainless steel item of their choice. This could include items from the website or a small object you design yourself. Leave your email in comments below and we’ll pick one winner at random on Friday at noon Eastern.

For just under $10, you can get a themed stylus in either metal or the white, slightly flexible plastic they use for some stuff over at Shapeways. I’d definitely get the shield, although the mushroom is pretty cute. I doubt these will fit in the DS’s little stylus slot, though.

Good news, people with Dads or Dad analogs! Show Pop you care with Shapeways custom cufflinks.

Shapeways can offer two winning CrunchGear/TechCrunch readers each a pair of the custom 3D printed metal cufflinks as a Father’s Day gift. The final shipping date for this item is May 26, 2009, so be sure to let me know the winners prior to then. These items MSRP for $49, including shipping and gift packaging.

UPDATE – Congrats to Dave P and Kim, our winners. Thanks for playing!

Note: these don’t have to go to your Dad. Maybe Mom likes men’s dress shirts. No judgment.

How do you win? Tell us about how your dad turned you into a geek in comments. We’ll pick two commenters at random. We’ll close the contest on Friday, May 22, at noon ET.

We’ve been in love with Philips off-shoot Shapeways for months now and the service just got nominally better. While you can still fab in plastic, today you will be able to fabricate the first 3D items in brass, a cool and unusual addition to the Shapeways service.

Right now you can only create brass “ring poems” – a fairly limiting proposition – from now until March 31st. The “ringpoem maker” lets you choose a font and a design and Shapeways will do the rest, creating a unique napkin ring for your special occasion. The rings cost $50 each.

While the cynical among us will say “$50 for a napkin ring? F that noise!” I beg you to understand that this is autofabrication in brass, something our ancestors would equate to dark and evil magic.

First 3D Metal Printing Service for DIY Consumers Announced: Shapeways
Bronze RingPoems

Just in Time for Easter or Passover Festivities, Shapeways Introduces First
Step to Bringing 3D Metal Printing To the Masses With Bronze Personalized
Heirloom Napkin Rings

Eindhoven, The Netherland – March 25, 2009 – For the first time,
Shapeways.com enables DIY creative individuals to express their poetic
spirit in precious metals with the Shapeways Creator RingPoems napkin rings.
The Shapeways RingPoem Creator uses text, like an inspirational quote, poem
or family name, to create a 3D circular ring that can be placed around any
napkin, bottle of wine, or special item. The unique model is then printed
with Bronze metals using the latest in 3D printing technology.

In just a few mouse clicks users can type in text, select a font and create
a personalized Bronze 3D printed table accessory ideal for any elegant
celebration. A distinctive heirloom, the Shapeways Bronze RingPoem makes the
perfect accent for any holiday table setting. Shapeways CREATOR products
are produced and delivered globally within 10 working days. Attractively
priced at $49.00 each, including tax and shipping, the personalized napkin
RingPoems arrive beautiful packaged and add the perfect charm to any
occasion. The Shapeways Bronze RingPoems are offered only for a limited-time
at http://www.shapeways.com. The Shapeways RingPoems are also available in
White Strong and Flexible material for a modern, sleek design for any
special occasion.

The “lightsculpture” that gets made looks pretty much like an “emboss” filter applied to the picture, except actually 3D. The picture of me at right would end up looking like it does below, but it appears that once you get a light behind it, it looks more like a freaky amber cast. Sure, it’s pretty strange, but it might be kind of fun. Prices depend on the size, of course, but I think $40-$50 for a 4×6 is what you should expect. You could also design a little stand to hold it up and put a candle behind it.

There’s no real news here, just a couple pictures of the little objects you can cause to be made.

Imagine you wanted to create a 3D dummy of a new type of Web tablet. You just upload the design from some CAD software onto the site. Shapeways checks whether the object can be made and provides a real-time cost estimate. Within 10 working days, a tangible 3D product is produced and shipped globally. At the moment they only print to four kinds of plastics but other materials, like metal, are planned.

To reproduce something that already exists you’d need a 3D scanner, which costs thousands. So Shapeways is actually aimed at people with 3D CAD software used by small businesses and will eventually offer its own online CAD tools. The site uses 3D industry standard file formats (STL, Collada, X3D) and the average cost of objects is $50 – $150. At the moment it looks like they are limited to desktop-sized pieces, but perhaps we’ll one day see Star-Trek-style printing of bigger objects.

Shapeways is a spin-out startup from an incubator programme at Philips Electronics, in Eindhoven. The CEO is Peter Weijmarshausen, formerly of 3Dsoftware package Blender, and he has a team of 10 people. They plan to be out of private beta in a couple of months.

Update: Notionally they compete with US-based Ponoko, which allows people to mass customise and make bracelets, brooches, earrings etc and items like wooden coasters. But Shapeways looks capabale of more complex modelling.

TechCrunch readers can sign up for 500 beta invites here using the Beta Code: “TechCrunch100″.

(Photo Credit: “Petunia” 3D object designed by Dolf J. Veenvliet, Shapeways Community Member)