Crazy innovations are happening with the latest trend in fashion and technology diverting towards smart textiles and futuristic clothing! After Alexander McQueen’s skin being used for making apparel and accessories, there’s more that’s happening and it is a great news for the brands that are continually forced to say no to fur.

A group of scientists from MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tangible Media Group have found a way to print fur without the use of fur.

Jifei Ou, a member of the research team, said, “3D printers nowadays have potential to change the way we design materials, yet we are still mostly using it to print static objects like plastic cups.”

MIT researchers have developed a new software platform called ‘Cilllia’ that let users define various parameters such as density, height, thickness, and angle etc. in a matter of minutes. Software Cilllia, can print hair-like structures as thin as 50 microns (or 1/1000 of a millimeter), which, in turn, allows to alter everything starting from the hair’s height to texture, width, and angle. It’s wonderful because objects as fine as hair or fur with a very precise and fine feature, requires large amount of power as well as computational time to first design and then print, and the traditional 3D printing take hours.

The team, 3D printed bristle pad arrays that are like Velcro and acts like it too. Depending upon the angle of the bristles, the pads stick together with varying forces. In order to represent the height, width and angle, a colour-mapping technique was used that assigned three colours-red, green and blue, respectively. And then an algorithm to be fed to a 3-D printer was devised to translate the colour map into a model of a hair array. The team was also successful in printing hair on curved surfaces.

Finally, a rabbit shaped fur was created to equip LED lights, so when the rabbit was stroked, the lights automatically lit up. Lastly, a weight sorting table was created from panels of hair with specific heights and angles. When a small vibration force shook the panels, the hairs could move the coins spread across the table in a manner that they got sorted according to the coin’s weight.

“We aim to create programmable materials, and hair is just one of the examples we are exploring in our lab now,”Ou said.

Thanks to the new technique that prints hair-like structures with ease! The fashion industry will get the perks of using ‘fur’ that is not coming from animals.

Apart from fur, there are multiple things that can be created using this technology, taking 3D printing to yet another level. However, it’s up to one’s ingenuity to imagine and create. One can probably print wigs, hair and use them in some crazy creations.