The amazing folks in the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab have shared their research with creating the software to produce small hairs or Cilia from 150 to 50 micrometers to do things such as move, sense, adhere, or be aesthetically pleasing.
Looking into the Nature, hair has numerous functions such as to provide warmth, adhesion, locomotion, sensing, a sense of touch, as well as it’s well known aesthetic qualities. This work presents a computational method of 3D printing hair structures. It allows us to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables us to create super fine surface texture; mechanical adhesion property; new passive actuators and touch sensors on a 3D printed artifact. We also present several applications to show how the 3D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.
Read the entire paper here and visit the project page for more fascinating images of this work.
Printing Your Own Hair
If you want to use your FDM printer to try out some hair-powered prints see the below projects.
Droolopp Tutorial
Drooloop flowers are produced by purposefully printing out in the air and taking advantage of sagging filament as an aesthetic feature versus the normal dreaded print failure. Read the tutorial and try out some flowers for your loved one that will never die, create fascinating Jellyfish and in a little different technique create a bottle brush!