You're not looking back near far enough.
Mark Cola and Vivek Dave have been working in this field for over 20 years each. The technology stems from their work at Los Alamos, which they patented. See the patent links on this page. They developed/are developing their modules in-house (it's proprietary), and it is a real/physical piece of machinery that has been in Beta Testing for a year- one module with GE the other with Honeywell. I've seen photos of it (at the first Morris talk) and at this last conference call, Greg Morris of GE Aviation said it's working.... go back and take a listen... he talked about how incredible it is to be able to verify each layer of the build, and mentioned that now that they have all that data, they need to figure out what to do with it. This is why they signed those Adurant and Materialise agreements. They signed an agreement with Materialise so they can better integrate it with the majority of 3D printers, who use Materialise software. This may also be in order to get that closed-loop control (to where Sigma's feedback actually changes the parameters of the machine so it corrects on the fly) down the line. The Adurant agreement is to help manage the ridiculous amount of data that they generate. As of now, their units are standalone units, supposedly compatible with any 3D printing system; or welding, for that matter, however because it's standalone and not coming as a part of the machine (yet) they signed with Materialise to make sure it integrates.
In the future, they may license the tech to the main 3D printer makers so that it would be part of the machine itself.
Also- their first version of IPQA is commercialized, and if you go back and look at some of their published papers, it shows pictures of what a weld looks like without IPQA and what it looks like with IPQA and explains a lot more about the technology. I'm at work and the firewall won't let me post the link but someone can go on the sigma page and get it.
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