Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite visual artist of all-time. His use of color and heavy brushwork is unparalleled and should have the same reputation as the old masters of the craft. Needless to say, I was excited to go to the Van Gogh Museum. Getting to the museum, I was itching to go in and look at all the pieces within for hours. However, the presentations beforehand about their initiatives for seeing-impaired people and migrant background people were probably the most compelling part of the entire trip.
When 3D printing was first starting to gain commercial affordability, I thought about all of the things that I would want to print out if I had one, and this around the same time I started to get into the art world and appreciating art for the cultural importance that it has. Ever since learning about how thickly Van Gogh applied paint to his art, I have always wondered what it would feel like to run my hand across one of his paintings. So when 3D printing started to be commercially viable, I felt that the days until I was able to touch a Van Gogh were dwindling. That day finally happened when I went to the Van Gogh Museum and I was over the moon. I never even thought about the possible use case of 3D replicas of paintings for the blind and partially-sighted community. That is what is so amazing about humans, we can look at emerging technologies and come up with a plethora of adjacent use cases for the technology—many times not even close to what it was originally designed for.