3D Printing
Researchers Demonstrate a Customizable 3D Printing Design
Professors
and students at universities in the
United States and Israel may have taken the first step toward fully
customizable 3D printing design.
While
3D printing is growing in popularity and
use, the ability to create designs remains time-consuming with
designers having
to recalculate the geometry of objects each time they make a change,
leading to
waits of several minutes and sometimes several hours, if you include
the time
it requires for simulation software to test the redesign.
Researchers
at Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology and Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
in Israel presented a new
system they created, "Fab Forms," at the August Siggraph
conference presented
by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The
researchers took eight commonly used designs — including a high-heeled shoe, chess set, toy car and coffee mug — and
came up
with as many variations in design as they could find, in some cases,
hundreds
of thousands of them.
While
this took time, the task was made easier by
distributing the tasks over multiple servers in the cloud.
The
Fab Forms system they created allows a
designer using computer-aided design (CAD) applications to create all
the
available options that they might want.
Then
they created a user interface, a Web page
that opened in an ordinary browser. It consisted of a central window
where the
3D model of the object would be displayed, along with a group of
sliders that
represented the parameters of the object's design. The system would
automatically weed out all the possible parameters that would make the
model
unprintable.
For
instance, moving one of the sliders — perhaps
changing the height of the shoe's heel — would allow the system to
sweep
through all the associated geometries and, in real time, make changes
that
ordinarily would take hours to calculate.
"We
envision a world where everything you buy can
potentially be customized," said Masha Shugrina, an MIT graduate
student and
one of the system's designers. "A technology such as 3D printing
promises that
that might be cost-effective."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.
