Investing in Rapid Assembly: 3D Printing with Voxels

Right now you are looking at squares — thousands of tiny little squares on a screen.

This is something we all know well already, but it’s also something we go about our daily lives without ever giving much of a thought.

Fifty years ago (1965), the word “pixel” was first published by American engineer Frederic C. Billingsley of the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Billingsley used the word to describe the elements of video images coming from space probes on their way to the Moon and Mars.

The word “pixel” had already been used around Palo Alto for years, but until 1965, its meaning remained privy to a small group of engineering elite. Even then, it took years before the word would become widely recognized by the public.

Today, though, just about anyone who has ever used a computing device can identify what a pixel is. This is largely due to the fact that without pixels, the world as we know it simply wouldn’t exist.

Without pixels, there would be no smartphones, no Netflix, and no tablets. Hell, there wouldn’t even be an Internet if we weren’t able to represent digital information through pixels on a screen. In this sense, the pixel is arguably one of the single most important inventions of the modern age (if not of all time).

As ubiquitous as the pixel has become, though, it certainly has its limits. You cannot touch the squares on your screen with your hands — you can only look at them with your eyes. Pixels may be great for representing images on a flat surface, but that’s really as far as the technology goes.

But what if you could turn the pixel into something real… something you could touch? What if digital bits of information could be represented in three dimensions instead of just two?

The Next Pixel

As it turns out, taking the pixel to the next dimension is exactly what a select group of engineers is trying to do. The word for this newly conceptualized unit is called a “voxel,” and like the word “pixel” in 1965, it’s still relatively obscure to the public.

The reason most people have never heard the word “voxel” before is the same reason no one knew what a pixel was 50 years ago: The technology is still in its early stages and has yet to reach widespread consumer application.

We don’t expect this to last for long, though, because the potential applications for voxels are virtually limitless. Should any company devise a way to manipulate voxels effectively in the real world, we’re looking at an entirely new age not only of computing but of manufacturing as well.

Let me explain what I mean…

One easy way to think of a voxel is by looking at the wildly popular video game Minecraft. Even if you’ve never played the game yourself, the concept is pretty simple.

Minecraft is a game where you mine materials and build structures out of 3D, cube-shaped blocks. Each block has a different physical property allowing players to piece together their own interactive worlds.

For a Minecraft novice like me, this means building a house reminiscent of a child’s drawing, wondering to myself, “What’s the point of this game?” and then going about my day.

For the truly dedicated, though, it means constructing entire cities:

Or even functional lawnmowers, guitars, and computers that operate inside the video game.

What’s so amazing about this is that the community of Minecraft players has been able to make these things using nothing more than a collection of cube-shaped blocks.

Now all we need to do is expand this idea to the real world, but instead of Minecraft blocks, we have tiny physical units called voxels.

Rapid Assembly

As of today, voxels only exist in the virtual world, much in the way Minecraft blocks only exist in the video game. The 3D printing industry, for instance, currently uses voxel-based software models to create designs, but during the manufacturing process, no voxels are actually used.

The limitation to current methods is that 3D printing remains particularly rigid. Yes, we can print objects in virtually any shape, but ultimately all we have is a hunk of uniform material. It’s useful for toys and prototyping, but not for fabricating entire machines like computers or cell phones.

On the other hand, voxel-based 3D-printing — or rapid assembly, as it’s currently being called — would allow for a much more complex and flexible manufacturing process. Most importantly, it would allow 3D printers to piece together a wide array of materials during the fabrication process.

According to Jonathan Hiller of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab:

Imagine a desktop fabricator capable of making perfectly repeatable, arbitrary, multi material 3D objects with microscale precision. The objects would be composed of millions or even billions of small physical building blocks (voxels). Some building blocks could be hard, some could be soft. Some could be red, others green or blue. Some could be conductive and others could perform computation or store energy. Some could even be sensors and others actuators, and so on and so forth. With a relatively small repertoire of building block types and a rapid assembler, one could assemble a relatively large variety of machines at high resolution

Credit: bilderzucht.de

In the near future, the world “voxel” is likely to become as commonplace as the word “pixel.”

Rapid assembly, like computing before it, will start off as a low-resolution manufacturing process. As the technology advances, though, objects made by these machines will seem less and less “voxelated” (see the image above), just as digital imagery has become less and less pixelated.

Soon enough, you and I will be looking at cubes (and other voxel-shapes) the same way we look at squares today — they’ll be everywhere we look, but we’ll barely even take notice.

More on that, though, another day.

Until next time,

Jason Stutman

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