Could be the next big frontier? It's certainly going to be exciting to see how it progresses. 3D printing and virtual reality are what I'm currently most excited about. VR will be available to the masses by the end of the year, and we're not talking some hokey Nintendo power glove shit, we're talking fully immersive alternate realities, here.
Back to 3d prinitng - While we may very well be printing up our own stuff in our garage in a couple decades +/- a few years, I think it's more likely that it will just drive manufacturing prices down even lower. So it may be that in 5/10 years we'll be talking about the latest 3D printed chiner frame that we only paid a couple hundred bucks for but is even more precisely engineered.
I'd love to see it spark a manufacturing resurgence here in the US but most likely I think it will just make imported goods even cheaper. Cheap labor isn't the only reason companies outsource; The tax code is also written to incentivize off shore manufacturing.
Here's a 3d printing vid about a company in China that printed ten houses in 24 hours. It still all looks a bit unpolished so to speak but imagine when tech in the vid like posted above makes it's way into more and more factories.
