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Its very inspiring to see how

these [hair-like] structures occur
in nature and how they can
achieve different functions, says
Jifei Ou, a graduate student in
media arts and sciences at MIT.
Were just trying to think how can
we fully utilize the potential of 3-D
printing, and create new
functional materials whose
properties are easily tunable and
controllable. Pictured is an
example of 3-D printed hair.
Courtesy of Tangible Media Group/MIT
Media Lab

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Need hair? Press print

With fur, brushes, and bristles, Media Labs technique opens new frontier
in 3-D printing.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
June 16, 2016

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These days, it may seem as if 3-D printers can spit out just about anything,
from a full-sized sports car, to edible food, to human skin. But some things
have defied the technology, including hair, fur, and other dense arrays of

RELATED

Paper: Cilllia 3-D Printed Micro-pillar

Structures for Surface Texture,
Actuation, and Sensing

extremely fine features, which require a huge amount of computational time

and power to first design, then print.

Video: Cilllia 3-D Printed Micro-pillar

Structures for Surface Texture,
Actuation, and Sensing

Now researchers in MITs Media Lab have found a way to bypass a major
design step in 3-D printing, to quickly and efficiently model and print
thousands of hair-like structures. Instead of using conventional computer-aided

Jifei Ou

design (CAD) software to draw thousands of individual hairs on a computer

a step that would take hours to compute the team built a new software

Tangible Media Group

platform, called Cilllia, that lets users define the angle, thickness, density, and
height of thousands of hairs, in just a few minutes.
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height of thousands of hairs, in just a few minutes.

Media Lab

Using the new software, the researchers designed arrays of hair-like structures
with a resolution of 50 microns about the width of a human hair. Playing with

School of Architecture and Planning

various dimensions, they designed and then printed arrays ranging from
coarse bristles to fine fur, onto flat and also curved surfaces, using a
conventional 3-D printer. They presented a paper detailing the results at the
Association for Computing Machinerys CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems in May.

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The researchers attached the 3-D printed hairs to a ring. (Courtesy of the researchers)

Could the technology be used to print wigs and hair extensions? Possibly, say
the researchers. But thats not their end goal. Instead, theyre seeing how 3-Dprinted hair could perform useful tasks such as sensing, adhesion, and

once, no
assembly
required
Tough biogel
structures
produced by 3-D
printing

actuation.
To demonstrate adhesion, the team printed arrays that act as Velcro-like bristle
pads. Depending on the angle of the bristles, the pads can stick to each other

Affordable
precision printing
for pros

with varying forces. For sensing, the researchers printed a small furry rabbit
figure, equipped with LED lights that light up when a person strokes the rabbit
in certain directions.
And to see whether 3-D-printed hair can help actuate, or move objects, the
team fabricated a weight-sorting table made from panels of printed hair with
specified angles and heights. As a small vibration source shook the panels,
the hairs were able to move coins across the table, sorting them based on
the coins weight and the vibration frequency.
Jifei Ou, a graduate student in media arts and sciences, says the work is
inspired by hair-like structures in nature, which provide benefits such as
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warmth, in the case of human hair, and movement, in the case of cilia, which
help remove dust from the lungs.
Its very inspiring to see how these structures occur in nature and how they
can achieve different functions, Ou says. Were just trying to think how can
we fully utilize the potential of 3-D printing, and create new functional materials
whose properties are easily tunable and controllable.
Ou is lead author on the paper, which also includes graduate students
Gershon Dublon and Chin-Yi Cheng; Felix Heibeck, a former research
assistant; Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor in media arts and
sciences; and Karl Willis of Addimation, Inc.
A software challenge
The resolution of todays 3-D printers is already pretty high, Ou says. But
were not using [3-D printing] to the best of its capabilities.
The team looked for things to print that would test the technologys limits. Hair,
as it turns out, was the perfect subject.
[Hair] comes with a challenge that is not on the hardware, but on the software
side, Ou says.
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side, Ou says.

The 3-D printed hairs act like Velcro. (Courtesy of the researchers)

To 3-D-print hair using existing software, designers would have to model hair
in CAD, drawing out each individual strand, then feed the drawing through a
slicer program that represents each hairs contour as a mesh of tiny triangles.
The program would then create horizontal cross sections of the triangle mesh,
and translate each cross section into pixels, or a bitmap, that a printer could
then print out, layer by layer.
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Ou says designing a stamp-sized array of 6,000 hairs using this process

would take several hours to process.
If you were to load this file into a normal slicing program, it would crash the
program, he says.
Hair pixels
To design hair, the researchers chose to do away with CAD modeling entirely.
Instead, they built a new software platform to model first a single hair and then
an array of hairs, and finally to print arrays on both flat and curved surfaces.
The researchers modeled a single hair by representing an elongated cone as a
stack of fewer and fewer pixels, from the base to the top. To change the hairs
dimensions, such as its height, angle, and width, they simply changed the
arrangement of pixels in the cone.
To scale up to thousands of hairs on a flat surface, Ou and his team used
Photoshop to generate a color mapping technique. They used three colors
red, green, and blue to represent three hair parameters height, width, and
angle. For example, to make a circular patch of hair with taller strands around
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the rim, they drew a red circle and changed the color gradient in such a way
that darker hues of red appeared around the circles rim, denoting taller hairs.
They then developed an algorithm to quickly translate the color map into a
model of a hair array, which they then fed to a 3-D printer.
Using these techniques, the team printed pads of Velcro-like bristles, and
paintbrushes with varying textures and densities.

Vibrations cause a piece of metal to move across the 3-D printed hairs. (Courtesy of the researchers)

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Fuzzing drawing
Printing hair on curved surfaces proved trickier. To do this, the team first
imported a CAD drawing of a curved surface, such as a small rabbit, then fed
the model through a slicing program to generate a triangle mesh of the rabbit
shape. They then developed an algorithm to locate the center of each triangles
base, then virtually drew a line out, perpendicular to the triangles base, to
represent a single hair. Doing this for every triangle in the mesh created a
dense array of hairs running perpendicular to the rabbits curved surface.
The researchers then used their color mapping techniques to quickly
customize the rabbit hairs thickness and stiffness.
With our method, everything becomes smooth and fast, Ou says. Previously
it was virtually impossible, because whos going to take a whole day to render
a whole furry rabbit, and then take another day to make it printable?
Among other applications, Ou says 3-D-printed hair may be used in interactive
toys. To demonstrate, his team inserted an LED light into the fuzzy printed
rabbit, along with a small microphone that senses vibrations. With this setup,
the bunny turns green when it is petted in the correct way, and red when it is
not.
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The ability to fabricate customized hair-like structures not only expands the
library of 3-D-printable shapes, but also enables us to design alternative
actuators and sensors, the authors conclude in their paper. 3-D-printed hair
can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.
Kelly Schaefer, a designer at IDEO, a design consulting firm, says this type of
work expands the possibilities of 3-D printing as an industry because of the
new applications it suggests.
Perhaps more inspiring than any single output from this team is the idea of
rethinking the 3-D printing process itself and the purpose of 3-D printed
objects, says Schaefer, who was not involved in the research. The Cilllia
team has challenged some of the current constraints of 3-D printing
processes, which makes me wonder what other constraints can be challenged
and potentially eliminated.

Topics:

3-D printing

3-D

Computer modeling

Computer science and technology

Research
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Software

Design

Media Lab

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MIT NEWS
June 17, 2016

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Eye-tracking for all

LIGO: We did it again

Crowd-sourced data yields

system that determines where
mobile-device users are
looking.

Signal was produced by two

black holes colliding 1.4
billion light years away.

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Need hair? Press print

With fur, brushes, and bristles, Media Labs technique
opens new frontier in 3-D printing.

Standing with Orlando

Hundreds gather to mourn
Orlando shooting victims,
reflect on gun violence and
bigotry.

LATEST MIT NEWS

AROUND CAMPUS
Why do women leave
engineering?
Study: Group dynamics of
teamwork and internships deter
many women in the profession.

Democracy now
Political scientist Evan Lieberman
studies ethnic identity and African
politics.
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A smart water grid for

the Indus Basin

For the second time,

scientists have detected
gravitational waves produced
by the collision of two black
holes, reports Irene Klotz for
Reuters. We are starting to
get a glimpse of the kind of
new astrophysical information
that can only come from
gravitational-wave detectors,
says David Shoemaker, who
leads Advanced LIGO.

IN THE MEDIA
A new study co-authored by
MIT Prof. Susan Silbey
examines why female
students leave the field of
engineering. When the
researchers analyzed "more
than 40 engineering
students twice-monthly
diaries, they found that
female students often felt
marginalized during group
activities, Inside Higher
Ed
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politics.

activities, Inside Higher Ed

reports.

New solar absorber could

improve efficiency of solar
thermal technology
Masdar Institute-MIT team develops
device that harnesses more
sunlight, enhancing efficiency of
heat production.

Eight from MIT

awarded 2016
Fulbright grants

Letter regarding vigil for

Orlando shooting victims

Energy storage for

renewables can be a good
investment today, study
finds

Air quality sensors

track pollution

Boston Globe reporter

Bryan Marquard writes
about the life and work of
Prof. Emerita Suzanne
Corkin, who was widely
known for her work with the
famous amnesiac Henry
Molaison. Brenda Milner, a
neuroscientist at McGill
University, noted that
Corkins painstaking
attention to detail and her
enormous enthusiasm its
a very nice combination,
and she showed that
always.

Systems that bank energy can add

value to solar and wind projects.

New approach to
microlasers
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In an article for New

Scientist, Lisa Grossman
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Technique for phase locking

arrays of tiny lasers could lead to
terahertz security scanners.

Portuguese
entrepreneurs
participate in MIT's
International Workshop
on Innovating

WEDNESDAY: LIGO,
Virgo scientists
discuss continued
search for gravitational
waves at AAS meeting
Researchers find a way to extend life and
improve performance of fuel cell electrodes

ADVISORY

Surface treatment greatly reduces degradation of catalyst

material.

Featured video: The

MIT Telephone
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Scientist, Lisa Grossman

writes that for the second
time the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational
Wave Observatory (LIGO)
has detected gravitational
waves. This gives us
confidence, says MIT
research scientist Salvatore
Vitale. It was not just a
lucky accident. Seeing a
second one tells us clearly
that there is a population of
black holes there.

Scientists have observed a

second pair of black holes
colliding using the twin
detectors of the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational
Wave Observatory (LIGO),
reports Dennis Overbye for
The New York Times.
Overbye writes that LIGO
provides a way of hearing
the universe instead of just
looking at it.
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Banquet

Department of
Mechanical
Engineering wins New
England Emmy Award
for Hope
Regenerated

Boston Globe reporter Eric

Moskowitz writes that
scientists have been able
to detect gravitational
waves for the second time.
Its a wondrous thing,
said David Shoemaker, who
leads the MIT lab that
helped build the detectors.
Three months apart, 1.4
billion years ago, these two
events happened at two
different places in the sky.

Ryan Mandelbaum of
Popular Science speaks
with David Shoemaker, who
leads MITs LIGO Lab and
Advanced LIGO, about the
second successful
detection of gravitational
waves. "Its wonderful," says
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Shoemaker. "Its so
different from the first one
... but its importance is no
less."

Jarrod Goentzel and Fredrik

Eng Larsson of the Center
for Transportation and
Logistics write for The Wall
Street Journal that
companies seeking greater
supply chain visibility must
quantify the benefits of
such information. They write
that to make a clear case
for investment in visibility
systems, companies must
focus on the tools that
transform data into
structural improvements.

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READ MORE

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