DESIGN NAME: Unream
PRIMARY FUNCTION: Voxel Printed Lamp
INSPIRATION: There are increasing conversations around interactive and responsive materials, most of them require additional medium like electronic input. We want to create a new material organization that responds directly to user intervention or the environment. With multi-material 3D printing, we envision a future where designers can manipulate color, texture, and reflectivity of materials freely, creating objects with unique optical expressions that can be never achieved with other methods.
UNIQUE PROPERTIES / PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Unream is the first 3D printed object that displays dynamically by itself. With the most advanced multi-material voxel printing technology, we create 'dream-like9; materials that used to exist only in the digital world. Covered by lenticular lenses, Unream is a daytime artifact and night lamp revealing dynamic colors in different viewing angles. With Unream, we reimagined the relationship between human, space, and objects by expanding binary material presence to dynamic material experience.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION: When walking pass the object, it looks like a digital screen with ambient animation.
PROJECT DURATION AND LOCATION: The project started in June 2019 at MIT and finished in February 2020 at San Fransisco.
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PRODUCTION / REALIZATION TECHNOLOGY: Most of the material is a single layer of a separate entity that only exists uniformly on a product surface. With Unream, we break this inertial thinking by embedding information into three-dimensional matter (voxel) and assign different material properties to each voxel in multi-material printing. Designers can use our computational workflow to create object interfaces with various material distributions that can display unique material expressions.
SPECIFICATIONS / TECHNICAL PROPERTIES: Height: 220 mm * Width: 100mm
TAGS: 3D printing, Multi-material printing, voxel printing, lenticular effect, lighting design, dynamic material, material interface, illusory material, optical textiles
RESEARCH ABSTRACT: Unream is one of the products designed with "illusory material": a MIT research about 3D printing lenticular effect. The lenticular effect people can create, and the quality of optical aberrations is highly restricted by existing manufacturability in optical lens and printer resolution. Normally, the making of lenticular sheet and content images are separate and handled by different people. With multi-material 3D printing, we can design the optical lens together with the image content, experimenting with different shapes and depths of the lens, surface form, and even the transparency and hardness of the image content. At the product/object level, it is possible to apply the lenticular effect on any form, manipulating the optical properties of any object surface.
CHALLENGE: Structural textures are extremely hard to be applied on a free-form model using 3D printing. With our workflow, not only structural textures but also optical textures can be applied on any 3D surface. With Unream, we've developed a computational workflow that can assign different material properties to each voxel in multi-material printing.
ADDED DATE: 2020-03-31 05:22:47
TEAM MEMBERS (4) : Designer: Jiani Zeng, Designer: Honghao Deng, Advisor: Axel Kilian and Advisor: Stefanie Mueller
IMAGE CREDITS: Jiani Zeng
PATENTS/COPYRIGHTS: Copyrights belong to Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng, 2020
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