A bright-green laser flashes on, shining into a petri dish full of goo. From nowhere, the shape of a paper clip emerges—ghostly at first, then solid. Five seconds later the clip is fished out, cleaned up, and ready for use.
The basic principle here is an established 3-D-printing technique that uses lasers to cure a light-activated monomer into solid plastic. But unlike other approaches, which scan a laser back and forth to create shapes one layer at a time, this system does it all at once using a 3-D light field—in other words, a hologram. It could make 3-D printing far faster.
At the heart of the device that printed the paper clip is a holographic chip developed by Daqri, a startup that designs and builds augmented-reality devices out of laboratories in San Francisco and in Milton Keynes, U.K. The company makes smart glasses similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens and head-up displays for cars; the latter have been fitted to over 150,000 vehicles made by Jaguar Land Rover.
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