The technology of additive manufacturing – also known as ‘3D printing’ – holds the potential for revolutionising industrial production at all levels. Although the underlying techniques to build up physical items layer by layer from digital 3D design models have been in use since as early as 1986, only big companies could afford the necessary knowledge and equipment. Since 2008, things have chan...

We present an adaptive slicing scheme for reducing manufacturing time of 3D printing system. Based on a new saliency based metric, our method optimizes the thicknesses of slicing layers to save the printing time and preserve the visual quality of printing results. We formulate the problem as a constrained `0 optimization and compute the slicing result via a two-step optimization scheme. To furt...

The recent development of 3D printing techniques enables novel applications in customized food fabrication. Based on a tailor-made 3D food printer, we present a novel personalized food printing framework driven by portrait images. Unlike common 3D printers equipped with materials such as ABS, Nylon and SLA, our printer utilizes edible materials such as maltose, chocolate syrup, jam to print cus...

Bone replacement materials used in tissue engineering require a high degree of safety and biological compatibility. For these reasons synthetic bone replacement materials based on calcium-phosphates are being used more widely. To mimic natural bone, rapid prototyping processes and especially 3D printing are favourable. Using 3D printing, complex 3 dimensional structures can be made easily. In t...

Dmitri is a hexapod robot designed to explore biologically influenced behaviors, manufactured using 3D printing. The use of 3D printing results in not only rapid turnaround time of the physical components, but helps to evaluate software or simulation. Biologically inspired robots may involve complex shapes to correctly mimic biology, and such designs are only economically feasible through the u...

The emergence of inexpensive and flexible 3D digitization tools and technologies and of increasingly easy to use and intuitive 3D editing software, as well as affordable and accessible 3D printing, has lowered the bar for creative engagement with the museum through digital 3D activities. Museums are increasingly making 3D models from their collections available online 1 and a vast number of 3D ...

Tissue engineering technology promises to solve the organ transplantation crisis. However, assembly of vascularized 3D soft organs remains a big challenge. Organ printing, which we define as computer-aided, jet-based 3D tissue-engineering of living human organs, offers a possible solution. Organ printing involves three sequential steps: pre-processing or development of "blueprints" for organs; ...

Recently, specialized applications of 3D printing have extended into the biological realm. As the field is so new, related activities are being approached from groups with disparate specialties and backgrounds. Therefore, few firm, unambiguous and universally understood definitions have been established. Many have local and connotative meanings, and most have both unique and overlapping aspects...