5 Ways A Radically New Way To 3D Print Could Change The World

From Fast Company:

Earlier this morning, we unveiled what might be the future of 3-D printing. Hyperform was developed by MIT grads and designers Marcelo Coelho and Skylar Tibbits to print large objects using small desktop printers. Where orthodox 3-D-printing techniques are fundamentally limited by the size of a printer bed, Hyperform prints large objects through a process of computational folding. You might be wondering about some of the project's practical applications and the possible uses it has for designers and architects. But first, a recap: Hyperform maps the shape of an object and reduces it to one continuous line, then folds it according to a space-filling curve (in the first iteration's case, a Hilbert Curve). The lines are designed as links, with specified joints and notches that connect to one another. This endless chain is packed into a dense cluster that fills the interior of the 3-D printer enclosure. Once printing has concluded, the user fishes out the polymer chains, which are encoded with assembly "instructions." All that's left to do is quickly piece together the object. "The game you're playing is what is the longest possible curve you can fit in the smallest possible volume," Tibbits explains, referring to the system's most consequential step. Once you've got that squared away, and have coded the notches at all the right points, printing can happen. Compared to most 3-D-printing projects, the assemblage process is child's play, requiring little more than snapping together the components.

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