Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng · CLIENT: MIT HCI Engineering Group
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.
Press Kit
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Image Credits
- Jiani Zeng
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Jiani Zeng and Honghao Deng, 2020
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