MIT News has a story on technology for 3-D printing developed at the school.
Other groups have attempted to 3-D print glass objects, but a major obstacle has been the extremely high temperature needed to melt the material. Some have used tiny particles of glass, melded together at a lower temperature in a technique called sintering. But such objects are structurally weak and optically cloudy, eliminating two of glass's most desirable attributes: strength and transparency.
The high-temperature system developed by the MIT team retains those properties, producing printed glass objects that are both strong and fully transparent to light. Like other 3-D printers now on the market, the device can print designs created in a computer-assisted design program, producing a finished product with little human intervention.
Both an academic paper and a demonstration video are available.
(Score: 2) by snick on Tuesday September 15 2015, @01:03PM
The "printer" doesn't deposit discrete pixels, but extrudes an endless worm of molten glass. This is cool technology, and shows a great control of material and temperature, but is still much more limited in the structures it can create than a conventional 3d printer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15 2015, @03:34PM
Maybe this device should be called a 3D plotter, [wikipedia.org] then.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday September 15 2015, @05:20PM
Perhaps all of these different methods could be used together? It would seem once a technology barrier is overcome, it is only a matter of time (!) before it recombines with other methods...
(Score: 2, Informative) by beernutz on Tuesday September 15 2015, @05:29PM
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that is exactly how a 3D printer works as well. It extrudes a continuous "worm" of molten ABS or PLA. I don't know of any 3D printers that print in a discrete matrix as you suggest.
(Score: 2, Informative) by xav on Tuesday September 15 2015, @05:38PM
No mention of 3GDP here but this seems the same news as https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/23/0314241 [soylentnews.org] (same academic paper, same video)