Brian McLean

Are you ready for this?

Voxel printing.

Thanks.

You've all heard of pixels, right?

The little 2D dots that make up 2D imagery?

Well, a voxel is basically a three-dimensional pixel.

A voxel is tiny.

There's something like 338 million voxels in a cubic inch.

So unlike the inkjet printing we'd used before that were based on decades of 2D inkjet technology where colors can overlap to mix color, voxels cannot mix.

Each voxel has to occupy its own 3D space.

The printer jets down distinct voxels of cyan, yellow, magenta, black, white, and clear resin layer by layer in different patterns.

Now, because we're printing a three-dimensional object, the shape of that object and the way that light hits the surface and is either reflected off or absorbed in affects the colors our eyes see.

So what that means is the pattern of voxels of magenta and yellow to print an orange sphere are different than that of an orange cube.

If you were to take one of our faces and look at it under an electron microscope, you would not see smooth, mixed color, but instead, millions and millions of distinct voxels.

It's a lot like a pointillist painting.

If you stand back far enough, it appears as though the colors are mixed, but when you get close to the canvas, you can see the individual colors.

This was groundbreaking in the 3D printing world.

Not only could you create sophisticated color parts, but you could start to control the interior as well.

Remember, there are voxels throughout the entire volume, not just on the surface.

By leveraging visual effects software packages typically used in big budget movies to render explosions, tornadoes, or raging oceans,