3D printing is only going to get cheaper and more accessible - I think pretty soon that "heirloom" is going to look like a dollar-store trinket.
Still, aside from the hyperbole this is a pretty neat idea, and New Zealand certainly has some landscapes worth this treatment too (including fjords, even). Australia has some impressive cliff forms that would work; seems like thousands of areas worldwide.
We pin the price to $100 and vary our markup depending on volume. The most dramatic landscape in Norway, Trollveggen – the image we shown on the site, gives us a markup of exactly zero. We're running this off a small cluster of colocated boxes with SSDs to handle the IO for the elevation models. So it's mostly to keep the lights on.
That said, we hadn't tested it on flatter landscapes and the models we tested with only gave us a markup of a few dollars. The markup we put on your model seems slightly greedy. We're lowering it now to a maximum of $20.
Google's 3D building data for some cities (e.g. here in Edinburgh) is incredible - I'd tempted to get a 3D printer and work out ways of printing interesting parts of town.
Maybe my favourite mountains as well from OS data...
I like backpacking, and often spend money on topographic maps because of this (typically from mytopo.com). I do like this site's idea. It obviously wouldn't work as a map, but it might be nice to integrate a lot of standard topographic map features into the models themselves. Especially if you can do it on really small-scale areas, architects might really want it.
That depends on the 3D printing technology. Some are perfectly fine with overhangs because the medium is self-supporting, and most can handle small overhangs at each vertical step without much trouble.
Very interesting. But why restrict this to just landscapes? What's to prevent someone from allowing 3D printing of any landmark in the world like the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, Eiffel Tower or London Eye?
It would almost certainly depend on the country, but if the structure has some kind of copyright, miniature replicas would likely not be legal without permission.
In some countries, building facades and similar can be copyrighted, which is mostly discussed in the context of photography. Some countries have an exception called "freedom of panorama", which gives some fair-use rights for photographs of things that can be photographed from a public street. How broad such permission is varies: in some jurisdictions it's fairly broad permission, while in other countries it may only apply to photographs of a general street scene that contains the building as one element, but may not apply to detailed architectural photography focused on a particular building.
But that's only for photography, at least so far, not for 3d reproductions. To take an existing area where the distinction between the two comes up, in some jurisdictions you can take (and sell) photographs of sculptures that are installed in public squares under freedom-of-panorama, but still cannot sell reproductions of the sculpture, whether full-size or miniature, if it's new enough to be copyrighted.
The above doesn't typically to things old enough to be out of copyright, like Big Ben, or Rodin sculptures, though I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions have special-case laws about use of their famous landmarks.
Very neat. I'm ordering a print of my home town. Then we can add pins to show where our house, where grandparents live, etc. I'm sure the kids will enjoy it.
They wouldn't be that interesting. Planetary sized bodies are really spherical (oblate of course.) Even Olympus Mons at 22 km height is only 0.3% of Mars's diameter of 6700 km. If your Mars model was a meter wide, the biggest mountain would protrude for all of 3 mm worth of relief on the surface.
Slartibartfast: Oh, yes. Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway?
Arthur Dent: No. No, I didn't.
Slartibartfast: Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges.