“The Digitizer” sounds more like a machine that makes “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff” (as Doctor Who fans would put it) than a groundbreaking piece of real-life technology. But Makerbot, a 3-D printing company based in New York, made news at Austin’s SXSW festival this year with the unveiling of its new 3-D desktop scanner. Able to “save your kid’s play-dough sculptures,” the Digitizer does as its name implies: It makes digital files out of physical objects. The files can then be tweaked or played with on software, and exact copies can be made into solid objects using a 3-D printer.
