Thursday, September 09, 2004

3-D Monitor and 3-D Printer

I visited Derek Nowrouzi a friend from Microsoft, who's now a graduate student. He gave me a tour of his lab and showed me two impressive demonstrations.

The first is a 3-D monitor (see video) -- which in this case is showing a 3-D molecule. I've seen 3-D TVs before but this system was truly 3-D in that you could walk around the object and see it from completely different perspectives.

The second demo was a 3-D printer (see video). Basically you send it a design -- and presto -- out comes a plastic, 3-D object. What's amazing is that can output complex, multi-part objects in one go.