Light based 3D printer shapes custom objects from liquid resin

Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of a paper on the technology explained that the printer relies on a viscous liquid that reacts to form a solid when exposed to a certain threshold of light. Projecting carefully crafted patterns of light - essentially "movies" - onto a rotating cylinder of liquid solidifies the desired shape "all at once."

"Basically, you've got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D-printing resin in it," Taylor said. "Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it - how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high."