3D PRINT LAB.

» see 3d.auone.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KDDI announced it on 26 January 2015 and opened it the next morning, billed as 国内初, a Japan first, with a footnote admitting the claim rested on the company's own research. The pitch fit in a sentence. You designed a case for your phone in a web browser and paid 3,980 yen. About two weeks later a nylon case came in the post with your design printed into it.

The design tool gave you five base shapes and five case colors, plus roughly eighty three-dimensional stamps to drop onto the surface. KDDI reckoned the whole job could be done in about three minutes. Your account would hold twelve saved designs at a time, and the flat price included delivery. You needed an au ID to check out, though you did not have to be an au subscriber to get one. The list of handsets it could fit started at nine and reached thirteen by that September. The design tool itself ran on a PC only, and KDDI said so plainly: a service for making phone cases was one you could not use from a phone.

That handset list is the part that puts the whole thing out of reach from here. It ran to the INFOBAR A03, the AQUOS SERIE mini, the isai VL, the Firefox OS Fx0 and a couple of Xperias in their Japanese carrier trim. Most of those phones were never sold outside Japan under those names, and a service that only makes a case for phones you cannot buy is a service that has quietly decided which country it is for. The iPhones on the list were the only models anybody in Turkey was likely to be holding.

~ the record ~

~ three companies and no printer ~

A mobile carrier has no business owning a 3D printer and KDDI did not pretend otherwise. The printing was done by DMM.com, through the 3D print API that DMM.make had built for its own fabrication business. The five base cases were drawn by PRODUCT DESIGN CENTER, the studio of Keita Suzuki, whose goods brand ＜THE＞ exists to sell one definitive version of an ordinary object. The website and the browser-based modeling engine came from teamLab, which is what let you turn stamps into geometry without installing anything.

KDDI was specific about the machines, and the specificity was the point. These were powder-bed sintering printers rather than the spool-fed desktop units that had been in the press for two years by then. The cases came out in nylon, hard to break, with the faintly granular surface that process leaves behind. Anyone who had watched a hobby printer lay down plastic in visible stripes was meant to understand that this was a different industry.

~ the message on the inside ~

Some of the base designs let you emboss text or numbers, and the place they put that text was the inside of the case, against the back of the phone, where nobody would ever see it.

Keita Suzuki explained the choice on the site. You could write something private, and the design buried it under a mass of overlapping characters that mosaicked the words into illegibility. You would carry it around all day, pressed against the back of the phone in your hand, and the only way to read it was to take the case off.

~ the 209 bytes it left behind ~

It ended on 29 February 2016, thirteen months old, on a date that only exists every fourth year. No hour was published. No reason was published either, and the silence went further than usual: ITmedia and the mobile trade press had both covered the launch, and not one of them wrote up the ending. On KDDI's own register of dead services it is the only entry with that date, which for a carrier that normally retires things in batches means it was switched off entirely on its own account.

The address left behind a file of 209 bytes. The whole of it was a line of JavaScript that bounced visitors to the end-of-service list, so nobody got a farewell page or a notice, only a redirect into the obituary column. The register entry it landed on runs to two sentences, the second being a note that the information below was accurate as of the day the service closed. Underneath that sits the original product blurb, still in the present tense, still explaining what you can design and how soon it will arrive.

@}-->--

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       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
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