Every day we hear more and more about how 3D printing is changing the world. Today we got some insight on how 3D printing is changing the corporate world. In a Blog Post, Carl Ledbetter, the Senior Lead industrial Designer for Microsoft's Xbox One, revealed some staggering details about how Microsoft used 3D printing prototypes in order to find just the right design for the Xbox One.

Ledbetter revealed that they 3D printed many, many different versions of the Xbox One, which included:

  • 75 Different Xbox One console bodies
  • 100 Different Kinetics
  • 200 Different Xbox One Gamepads


Here is a look at just some of the 75 different Microsoft XBox One Prototypes which were printed out:


Ledbetter explained why it took so many tries in the quote below:
“There was this conundrum in that we had to meet and satisfy desires of core gamers and Xbox fans, and at same time we wanted Xbox to reach out and mean something to new people. From a design perspective, how do we make that happen? That was a big challenge.”
After all those, they came up with the final product: