Wondering what is this 3D printing or digital fabrication is all about? It’s not just latest addition to the digital jargon that won’t mean much to the common man.

It is about marrying a variety of apps available on the smartphone, add a few sensors here and there and hold them together with a 3D-printed holder.

Digital fabrication is about creating newer products with unique geometrical and material properties that cannot be created using conventional methods. Look at this example. A Japanese scientist is testing in Hyderabad a small device that promises to reduce the cost of measuring soil moisture from $300 to almost a dollar.

Masayuki Hirafuji, Director of National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation, explains how he adopted 3D to develop a holder than held an iPhone with a microscope. “See, you can print this holder in an hour.”

His team is in the process of studying the opportunities in scaling up the production so that farmers in Japan could use in their fields.

Talking to BusinessLine on the sidelines of International Symposium on digital Fabrication here on Monday, he says his team is using Open Source tools to build products affordable for farmers.

His team is presently busy creating a platform Cloud Open Platform to build agricultural Big Data, integrating open data and sensor data collected by Internet of Things and machine-to-machine conversations.

The two-day meet is being organised by IIT (Hyderabad), Keio University Japan, Deakin University Australia and Japan International Cooperation Agency.

“Digital fabrication is changing the way designing and fabrication is done, from that of machine parts, concrete structures, prosthetics, electronic components to almost anything,” UB Desai, Director, IITH said.

“The use of digital fabrication has spread in large manufacturing facilities over the last two decades, and interdisciplinary collaboration between academics and industry is serving to make the technology inexpensive and user-friendly, placing design and manufacturing in the hands of individuals,” according to Murai, Dean, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University.