My brother’s lab (not at MIT) has been 3D printing optically clear glass for years. They can do all sorts of shapes and figures, though I’m particularly fond of the Yoda heads. If I’m reading this article correctly, the breakthrough they made was with the temperatures they can do it at, and it’s much less to do with the novelty of 3D printing glass. So it’s much less “hey, this is amazing, nobody has ever done this before,” and far more “we did this cool thing in a new and harder way!”
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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we did this cool thing
Haaa, get it? Low temps.
I'm done.
I regret not catching that myself, that’s good 😁
Low temp has a lot of implications for spreading this technology. Being able to print complex glass shapes at low temperatures can open up all kinds of cool applications that wouldn't be possible at high temps.
First time for them
https://oxman.com/projects/glass-3d-printing
Sorry for the link but it’s glass printing 4 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/mv6j9n/my_molten_glass_3d_printer_5mm_layers_and_the/
Is it inside an annealer? There's not much techy info in these links, but cool as hell.
Great question. I just know I had seen glass printing before and maybe it’s the lower temperature or whatever that is the breakthrough but it isn’t new in practice.
#JustMITthings
new technique enables inorganic composite glass printed at low temperatures
The ones you linked look like they were printing at high temp.
Sounds like it would be a super fun nozzle clog situation.
This inorganic composite glass is made of inorganic materials
Department of redundancy department
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
I was thinking they may have a process like 3D metal sintering, using a laser to fuse powdered metal layers. In the very early days of that technology I saw a small polyhedra frame like a ball. The texture was very granulated and it felt like it would crumble if it you rubbed it between your fingers too roughly. But it was titanium and indeed a lot stronger than its appearance suggested.
This was (obviously) a very long time ago back when people were Frankensteining their own printers from components and off the shelf options were few and far between and prohibitively expensive. When the early adopters were losing their minds on the daily trying to calibrate, level and troubleshoot all the gribbles and gremlins. It was quite a deterrent to entering the hobby. I couldn’t imagine then that the technology would accelerate so quickly, to the point where a first time user can unbox, assemble and be printing accurate and tidy prints in under an hour.
Seeing what is happening with metal and glass printing these days is still blowing my mind. I love that we’re living in a time where there is so much interesting and fun stuff to discover and so much of it is being shared instead of hoarded.