Revolutionizing 3D Printing with Cilllia: Hair-like Structures at Your Fingertips

Jifei Ou's MIT Media Lab Team Unveils a New Dimension in Digital Fabrication

The team's design inspiration was drawn from the observation of hair-like structures in nature, found on animals and plants at various scales. Hair, beyond its basic functions of ornamentation and warmth, is a natural responsive material that interfaces between the living organism and its environment, creating functionalities like adhesion, locomotion, and sensing. The team sought to digitally design and fabricate hair structures, inspired by their unique high aspect ratio structure.

Cilllia's unique properties lie in its computational method of 3D printing hair structures. It allows the generation of hair geometry at a 50 micrometer resolution and assigns various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables the creation of super fine surface texture, mechanical adhesion property, new passive actuators, and touch sensors on a 3D printed artifact. The team has showcased applications to demonstrate how the method can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.

The realization of this design was achieved through stereolithography 3D printing. The team developed a voxel-based model generation method to instruct the printer to print various hair geometry and structure. Each sample is approximately 40 by 60 by 60 mm and can be assembled together to form larger designs.

The interaction with the design is facilitated by a new voxel-based printing software platform that lets users define the angle, thickness, density, and height of thousands of hairs in just a few minutes. The printed hair can be used as an adhesive surface like Velcro, an actuated surface to move objects in designed paths, or a sensing surface to sense user's touch and swipe.

The project, which started in February 2015 in Boston and finished in May 2016 in Boston, will be exhibited in Centre Pompidou in March 2017. The design was awarded the Golden A' Generative, Algorithmic, Parametric and AI-Assisted Design Award in 2017, a testament to its groundbreaking nature and potential for revolutionizing 3D printing and digital fabrication.