FabLab opened in Bratislava. (source: TASR)
DESIGNERS, researchers, engineers, students or entrepreneurs have a new place where they can create and put the results of their work into practice relatively quickly. A new experimental space, FabLab Bratislava, was ceremonially opened at the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technology at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava on November 4 in the presence of Juraj Draxler, the State Secretary of the Education Ministry, French Ambassador Didier Lopinot, and other officials.
“This is exactly the type of project for which we are calling and which we will continue to intensively support in the future,” said Draxler as cited by the TASR newswire.
FabLab (meaning fabrication laboratory) represents an open platform for the creation and manufacturing of prototypes of physical intelligent items. It is designed for entrepreneurs who want to more quickly pass from a concept to the creation of prototypes, and also designers, artists, researchers, engineers or students who want to experiment. There are available for them professional machines and numeric technologies, such as: 3D printers, laser cutting machines, serigraph machines and a milling machine for the production of forms.
The lab is open to the general public. After registration, those interested can learn how to use the available technologies.
The experimental lab was launched on the basis of cooperation between Slovak-French partners including the municipality of Bratislava, Slovakia’s Centre of Science-Technical Information (CVTI), the French Institute in Bratislava, the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technology at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, and Dassault Systeme.
The launch and operation of the lab is supported by the national project CVTI co-financed from the operational programme Research and Development.
Neil Gershenfeld from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology defined the idea of creating such centres in 2004. Such labs have been gradually launched in the US, Europe, Africa and elswhere.
