3D printed hair from MIT could have many innovative applications

The Media Lab at MIT is renowned for applying additive manufacturing to some of the most unusual and inspiring projects. In January, we reported on MIT researchers developing the G3DP2 system, capable of 3D printing glass. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology invested in 2016 in a new project, Cilllia. The Tangible Media Group (part of MIT’s Media Lab) was behind this project, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii. The group aims to “seamlessly couple the dual world of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation”. Project Cilllia aspired to study the structure and purpose of hair. It is one of the applications of 3D printing not often talked about but could have many applications in the years to come.

Even though 3D printing has recently shown it can print pretty much anything, some things still defy the technology. This includes hair, fur, and other dense arrays of extremely fine features. These structures require a huge amount of computational time and power not only to design but also to print. The Tangible Media Group have found a solution to the design hurdles by using something different than the conventional CAD software used to create a 3D model. Instead of drawing thousands of individual hairs on a computer, the team built a new software platform called Cilllia.

The software allows users to define the angle, thickness, density and height of thousands of hairs in just a few minutes. The designed arrays of hair-like structures have a resolution of 50 microns (width of a human hair). The team then experimented with different dimensions from coarse bristles to fine fur, onto flat and curved surfaces. They 3D printed these hairs using a conventional 3D printer.