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Most things that are 3D printed are still just a single colour of plastic, but some more than fancy printers might be able to print with a few colors. A new printing engineering science designed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has the potential to add significantly more colors to 3D printing without the need for additional print heads. Researchers in that location have developed colour-shifting dyes for 3D printed objects. Shine some low-cal on the object, and it changes colour.

The project started from a fashion perspective. MIT professor Stefanie Mueller, who led the research, was concerned nigh the wasteful state of consumerism. People sometimes buy new things but considering they get tired of the old one. She wondered if there wasn't some mode to update materials without buying something new, and the custom 3D printing dye dubbed ColorFab is what the team managed to come up with.

ColorFab isn't just the dye — it's an entire organisation for customizing objects after they've been printed. In the video below, a rather large and gaudy band was used to prove off the technique. Using the ColorFab 3D interface, users can design the object they desire and impress it in almost 20 minutes. Virtually of the layers are normal 3D printing plastic medium, but the top layer contains the ColorFab dye.

The ColorFab printing medium contains a base dye, a photo catalyst, and a colour-sensitive "photochromic" ink. When bombarded with UV light of the correct frequency, the ink shifts colors. Yous can even control which colors with the specific wavelengths. By versions of this process could only modify to a single pre-defined color, then the colour would but concluding as long as the UV light source was turned on. The coloring process takes virtually 20 minutes, only the color remains after y'all close the UV off.

The ColorFab software lets users cull which "pixels" on the object they desire to change. You could spell out words or depict simple pictures on ColorFab objects, but they won't last forever. Visible light resets the dye, and then it'll fade over time. The CSAIL squad measured how long it would take for the ink to reset from ambience low-cal, finding it degraded conscientiously, but was still visible later xxx days. A more intense lite source can exist used to manually reset the dye in a few minutes then you can re-color it. The team hopes to make ColorFab faster and more efficient to get in a viable product.

Now read PCMag's Best 3D Printers of 2018.