Over the past years, additive manufacturing (AM) has become a common tool for hackers and makers, with first FDM and now SLA 3D printers becoming affordable for the masses.

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While these machines are incredibly useful, they utilize a slow layer-by-layer approach to produce objects. A relatively new technology called Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (VAM) promises to change all that by printing the entire object in one go, and according to a recent article in Nature , it just got a big resolution boost. The concept is similar to SLA printing, but instead of curing the resin by projecting a 2D image of the current layer into the container, VAM uses multiple lasers to create intersecting points within the liquid. After exposing the resin to this projection for several seconds, the 3D model is built all at once. Not only is this far faster, but it removes the need for support materials and even a traditional build plate is unnecessary. Visualization of the dual-color printing process as used by Regehly et al. (Credit: Nature) Up till now the resolution and maximum object size of VAM has left a lot to be desired, but in this new research by Regehly et al. […]

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