A 3-D printer that can print data sets as physical objects

A team of researchers from MIT and Harvard University has come up with a way to get 3-D printers to print objects using data sets rather than geometric representations. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their new technique and some of the ways they believe it could be used.

Anyone who has seen a modern 3-D printer in action knows that there is a lot of room for improvement. Printed objects are generally a single color and have a blob-like quality. In this new effort, the team at MIT has developed a technique that uses actual data describing an object to print the desired object. The result is comparable to moving from a dot-matrix printer to a laser printer.

The new technique converts data that describes the digitized image to voxels (3-D pixels). That allows the printer to print voxels instead of shapes, with incredible precision—currently at a resolution of 2.3 million voxels per cubic centimeter.

Read more at Phys.org

 

Image Credit: Science Advances

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