Researchers from MIT Media Lab and Harvard University have developed a method for accurately physicalizing scientific visualizations using multimaterial 3D printers:
To fabricate an item on conventional 3D printers, one must make calculations regarding the object’s digital description, and then convert the resulting numeric description to geometric shapes which can be used to 3D print it. But the research team has developed a new technique to 3D print multimaterial data sets as physical objects, which requires less pre-processing to create a more direct data-to-object translation, and builds a bridge between the physical and the digital.
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The technique actually negates the need to create an intermediate boundary representation of an object, which can end in information loss or data alteration for less ideal physical results.
Sources:
- Sarah Saunders (2018) Researchers Develop Multimaterial Voxel-3D Printing Method For More Direct Data to Object Translation.
- Christoph Bader et al. (2018) Making data matter: Voxel printing for the digital fabrication of data across scales and domains.
- Images from chemeurope.com.