Layered Fabric Printing

A Layered Fabric 3D Printer for Soft Interactive ObjectsHuaishu 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 AdafruitFuturityGizmodo; Geek.com and TechCrunch, among others.

James McCann

Headshot of Jim McCannJames McCann [research page] [disney page] is an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. He develops systems and interfaces that operate in real-time and build user intuition, with — at present — a focus on textiles artifact design and manufacturing. He also makes video games as TCHOW llc, including recent releases “Rktcr” and “Rainbow“. He obtained his PhD in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon University.