If 3D printing isn’t the future of mass manufacturing, what is?

The $2500 Wilson Airless Gen 1 basketball is not about Additive Manufacturing; it’s about vision and execution!

I was lucky enough to be one of 75 people to receive the black Wilson Airless Gen 1 Basketball. Though many see it as a significant step toward a future where additive manufacturing is ubiquitous in the production of consumer products, the $2500 price tag tells a different story. A basketball this expensive might make the case that methods such as SLS, SLA and FDM printing will not be cost-competitive with traditionally manufactured products for many more years. 

In the industrial design industry, additive manufacturing has been seen as a possible future of mass production for over a decade. Still, it really hasn’t lived up to the hopes that many of us had. The low piece prices of injection-molded components are incredibly difficult to compete with. Outside of some very expensive or highly technical low-volume components, additive manufacturing and 3D printing are still primarily methods of rapid prototyping, not mass production.

That being said, the aspect of the Wilson Airless Gen 01 that truly feels revolutionary is the basketball's performance. The Airless Gen 1 passes all the performance tests that an NBA basketball must pass for playability but achieves its bounce and feel through a completely different set of material properties. The Wilson development team was able to perfectly replicate the performance of an inflated basketball with a complex multi-layered lattice made from a 3D-printed TPU-like material.

This level of product reinvention and radical innovation is inspiring and incredibly rare. It requires a level of creativity that few designers and engineers possess and a technical team with the vision and dedication to pull off this seemingly impossible task. It makes me wonder, what else is possible if a basketball doesn’t need air?