3D printing produces human hair-like bristles - CNET

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Slowly but surely, researchers are stripping away the limitations of 3D printers. Until now, dense and finely-featured objects had been considered off-limits, simply because the computer-aided design (CAD) files required would be enormous and take hours to compute. But new software designed by researchers at MIT's Media Lab circumvents this problem.

Called Cilllia, it uses sliders to allow the users to create surfaces covered in thousands of hairs with a resolution of 50 microns, about the width of a human hair. Unlike CAD, where each hair has to be drawn individually, this process takes just a few minutes.

"[Hair] comes with a challenge that is not on the hardware, but on the software side," said first author Jifei Ou, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences, in a statement.

Cilllia uses sliders that allow the user to quickly change the parameters of the hair structure, with a real-time visual representation. The user can adjust height, thickness, profile and angle, as well as the quantity of hair on a structure. The software can even be used to create curved hairs in a spiral patte.