Z Corp. plucked a futuristic technology from the labs of MIT - a printer that can produce three-dimensional objects, in color - and built it into a $60 million-a-year business. Companies like Reebok, Raytheon, and Avid Technology use the printers to create prototypes of new products, quickly and inexpensively.

Now, Z Corp. chief executive John Kawola believes the company's next big opportunity lies in targeting a surprising customer base: not product designers and mechanical engineers, but video game players.

Starting with the release of the game Rock Band 2 this month, players will have the option of purchasing a collectible plaster figurine of the character they create - whether it's a lead guitarist with a Mohawk or a screeching lead singer sporting a skimpy bikini top. (The game is produced by Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems, a division of Viacom Inc.) The $75 figures will be produced at Z Corp.'s Burlington headquarters and shipped to players about a week after an order is placed through the Rock Band website.

"3-D printing should migrate anywhere people are using 3-D data," Kawola says, envisioning the new venture as something that could generate "$20 million, $30 million, $50 million in revenue" for the company. It might also encourage others to buy Z Corp.'s printers to set up similar printing operations. One Seattle-area start-up already has, and it has discovered far more demand than it can handle.

Z Corp. was founded in 1994 to commercialize a technology developed at MIT, which uses standard ink-jet printer heads - the kind you'd find in any home printer - to spray a glue or binder and colored pigment over a thin layer of a powdery substance. Do that over and over again, layer after layer, and the particles of powder (it can be a plaster or corn starch-based compound) essentially become a physical "pixel." After a few hours, you vacuum away the loose powder that hasn't been sprayed with glue, and what remains is a 3-D printed object.

Though others had marketed similar machines before, Z Corp. made a splash with its speed, its low cost, and its ability to print objects in color. The midrange printer Z Corp. will use to make the Rock Band figurines sells for about $40,000.

In 2005, the start-up was acquired by Contex Scanning Technology, a Danish company, for an undisclosed sum, though I'm told by a former Z Corp. executive that it was "more than twice" the company's $40 million in revenue at the time. In turn, Contex was sold to a private equity firm in Sweden last year, for about $240 million.

While the company has been successful duking it out in the market with publicly traded rivals like 3D Systems Inc., based in South Carolina, and Stratasys Inc., based in Minnesota, Z Corp. vice president Scott Harmon says that it felt compelled to explore new markets. Only about a million people in the world, from architects to industrial designers, use the kind of computer-aided design software that creates blueprints for 3-D objects that can be printed out on a Z Corp. printer, Harmon says - even though the software has been dropping in price. (None other than Google now offers free 3-D modeling software called SketchUp.)Continued...