Quick Summary
• EPFL’s Holographic 3D Printer Builds Tissue-Scale Structures 70 Times More Efficiently May 26
Additional Context
Researchers at EPFL have built a holographic 3D printing system that’s 70 times more energy-efficient than previous techniques, and they’ve used it to print a life-sized human ear — a potential step toward bioprinted implants for reconstructive medicine. The results were published May 21 in Light: Science & Applications.
The team, from EPFL’s Laboratory of Applied Photonic Devices (LAPD), built on earlier work in tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (TVAM), a method that fires laser light into a rotating vial of photosensitive resin to harden it into a desired shape. Their new platform is the first to directly control the phase of a light beam in a volumetric 3D printing system. That phase control, rather than adjusting brightness as older approaches did, preserves far more of th