Jonathan Wilhoite Blog: The Future of 3D Printed Hair

Thursday, June 23, 2016

The Future of 3D Printed Hair

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A single strand of hair with all of its characteristics may be fairly complex, but a team of researchers was able to develop a method of creating 3D printed hair in minutes.

3D Printed Hair Is Not As Easy As You Think

Researchers from the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were inspired by animal and human hair, even plants. They tried find ways to mimic these patterns through less resources and time.

It was a pain-staking process not because of the hardware need, but the software programmed to design and recreate the patterns. From this they were able to develop Cillia.

Their work was presented before the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

What previously took hours to do, now could only take minutes with the Cillia software platform.

More Than Just Wigs Or Toupe.

Designers can now create figures with detailed surface textures like coarse bristles, and paint brushes among others with the use of Cillia.

While the micro-pillar structures are not intended to create wigs, the researchers claim that it may be possible.

“When people hear about 3-D printing hair, the first thing they think about is definitely hair extensions, but the purpose of this project is looking beyond the aesthetic perspective,” says study author Jifei Ou an MIT graduate student. “What kind of new functionality can we bring to the material?”

They studied three main functions like adhesion, sensing and actuation, as they went on creating printed arrays similar to Velcro pads with LED lights. They also even invented hair that has the ability to move objects using a series of vibration movements using the hair structures.

Just like real hair

What made the cillia study unique is that researchers aim to use these materials to detect movements of fluid or air, similar to organic hair that act as sensory receptors.

“We are also looking for more functions that hair structure can provide. For example, thermal protection,” Ou explained.

They hope to someday explore the possibility of making it as real as hair, but the focus of their studies right now are more on its practical uses in industries or machinery. They however, did not close their ideas on it becoming a breakthrough technology in medicine or biology.

With the 3d printed hair already in the picture, it would not be a distant reality that it could become a good mane of hair.

Image Credit: Researchers hope to go beyond wigs with 3-D printed hair – CNN

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