Unream Voxel Printed Lamp by Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2020 Platinum A' Design Award in 3D Printed Forms and Products Design Competition Category.
Platinum3D Printing· 2020
Unream Voxel Printed Lamp
by Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng
Client: MIT HCI Engineering Group
Platinum A' Design Award Winner in 3D Printing Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #104797The Design
About Unream Voxel Printed Lamp
Unream is a lamp produced with multi-material voxel 3D printing. The surface is covered with lenticular lenses that are printed together with the color content. Unream shows different colors from different viewing angles, so the object appears to display a moving image when a person walks past. The lamp acts as an object in daylight and as a light source at night. The height is 220 mm and the width is 100 mm. A computational workflow assigns material properties to each voxel, which allows optical textures on free-form surfaces.
The Recognition
About the Platinum A' Design Award
Unream Voxel Printed Lamp is a Platinum A' Design Award winner, an extremely prestigious recognition granted to truly exceptional, elegant, and magnificent designs. Platinum winners are marvels of creation, testaments to the limits of intellectual creativity, and demonstrate the unmatched professionalism and genius of their designers. These designs are expected to be the most renowned works that define the aesthetics of an era, contribute to the well-being of society, and push the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Unream Voxel Printed Lamp exhibits a transcendent level of excellence and unequivocally makes the world a better place with its advantageous and worthwhile characteristics. Unream Voxel Printed Lamp is a Platinum A' Design Award-winning work that triggers desires, inspires, excites, delights, and sparks great joy.
Where to Get It
Material Innovation and Computational Design Research
We pioneer illusory materials through advanced 3D printing, creating dynamic optical experiences that blur physical and digital boundaries. Our MIT-affiliated research transforms how designers manipulate color, texture, and material properties for revolutionary product interfaces.
Contact UsInterviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
With this design, I hope to blur the line between the digital and physical world, bringing "impossible" materials to real-world product design. With the newest fabrication technology and computational power such as multi-material printing, 4D printing, soft robotics, we can embed information into three-dimensional matter (voxel), expanding binary material presence to dynamic material experience in everyday products.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
A computational workflow that allows creating optical effect on any free-form surface.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
This limited edition is available for sale. Please contact Designer Jiani Zeng at jnzeng7@gmail.com for more information. It will also be exhibited in some design exhibitions and conferences.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Unream is the first 3D printed object that displays dynamically by itself. With the most advanced multi-material voxel printing technology, we create 'dream-like' 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.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 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
- Production 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.
- Design 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.
- Research
- 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.
- 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.
- Project Duration
- The project started in June 2019 at MIT and finished in February 2020 at San Fransisco.
- Operation Flow
- When walking pass the object, it looks like a digital screen with ambient animation.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng, 2020
- Team Members
- Designer: Jiani Zeng
Designer: Honghao Deng
Advisor: Axel Kilian
Advisor: Stefanie Mueller - Image Credits
- Jiani Zeng
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