A Layered Fabric 3D Printer for Soft Interactive Objects. Huaishu Peng, Jennifer Mankoff, Scott E. Hudson, James McCann. CHI ’15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015.

In work done collaboratively with Disney Research and led by Disney Intern Huaishu Peng (of Cornell), we have begun to explore alternative material options for fabrication. Unlike traditional 3D printing, which uses hard plastic, this project made use of cloth (in the video shown above, felt). In addition to its aesthetic properties, fabric is deformable, and the degree of deformability can be controlled. Our printer, which works by gluing layers of laser-cut fabric to each other also allows for dual material printing, meaning that layers of conductive fabric can be inserted. This allows fabric objects to also easily support embedded electronics. This work has been in the news recently, and was featured at Adafruit; Futurity; Gizmodo; Geek.com and TechCrunch, among others.