The designer uses wearable, flexible plastic

to create incredible detail and volume in her clothes.

This is a 3D printed tracheal brace.

Doctors from the University of Michigan created custom support

for the airway of a baby who was born unable to breathe on his own,

Its made from bio-adsorbent plastic,

so it will disolve over time as his airway reforms around it.

And this is a 3D printed prosthetic leg.

The designer, Scott Summit uses resin and plastic and metal,

to craft tremendously personal designs.

They go way past the idea of just replacing a limb,

and become an expression of individuality.

These 3 projects are examples of the best thing about a 3D printer,

and that's really saying something

because there are a lot of amazing things about a 3D printer.

A 3D printer can make something very accurately.

It can make it very fast,

it can make it with very little material and very little energy,

and it can make it exactly when and where you need it.

But it can do more than that.

A 3D printer is more than a 3D photocopier,

at its best it does not copy,

it makes something that has never existed before.

So the dress, the airway brace, and the prosthetic leg,

the key to those innovations is that their authors saw the 3D printer

as more than a manufacturing device,

as more than a replicator.

They asked themselves,

"What can I do with this tool, that has never been possible before?"

We asked ourselves a similar question a couple of years ago,

we had promised to make our friend Chelsea a cake for her birthday.

And as the day approached, we went shopping

to get all the ingredients to bake it from scratch,

and we brought them home and unpacked all the groceries

in our tiny graduate studio apartment that we had just moved into.

And as we were standing there in the kitchen,

we suddenly realized, that we actually didn't own an oven.

(Laughter)

We didn't own an oven but we did own a 3D printer.

And so, naturally, we wondered,

"Would it be possible to just 3D print her a cake instead?"

And we tried, and we tried recipe after recipe,

and using every kind of sugar that we could find

mixed together in every ratio that we could think of,

and after months of that experimentation

that actually lasted well past her actual birthday,

we finally managed to 3D print Chelsea a tiny cupcake topper

that spelled her name in cursive sugar.

She loved it and we realized that

other people would probably love this too.

So when we graduated about a year ago, we founded the sugar lab,

a custom design firm for 3D printed sugar.

Using the same process that we had developed

for Chelsea's cupcake topper,

and that process is actually really simple at its core.

Its essentially just adding water to sugar.

So if you've ever made frosting, and left the bowl in the sink overnight,

you know that the next morning

the bowl is gonna be impossible to scrape out.

And thats because when you add water to sugar it solidifies,

we just add the water in a very precise way.

Liz von Hasseln: Here's how we do that.

We start with a digital,

3 dimensional model of the object we'd like to 3d print in sugar.

We run that model through software that slices it into layers.

These layers will be fed to the 3d printer one at a time,

starting with the very bottom one.

When that happens the printer spreads out a very fine layer of sugar,

and it uses an inkjet printhead just like the one you would find

in your desktop 2D printer,

to paint that bottom most crosssection of the object,

onto the layer of sugar, only using water instead of ink.

Then the printer spreads another very fine layer of sugar

on top of the first one,

and it paints the next cross section with water.

And it repeats this often many thousands of times,

until every layer of the object has been printed,

one on top of the other,

from the very bottom layer, up to the very top layer.

At that point the digital model that a few hours earlier

we could only look at on our computer screen

has been printed layer by layer

into a physical, material sugar object.

This particular sugar object we designed as a cake topper,

which makes this essentially 3d printed frosting.

But you can tell right away that this frosting

is doing something different,

now the frosting can be structural

it can be sculptural,

it can be geometric and mathematically precise.

It can be intricately perforated,

or it can just look like a duck.

(Laughter)

This frosting can basically look like almost anything you can think of

and it can be used in as many ways.

So you can 3D print custom sugar party favors,

or crazy little curly sugar cubes for your coffee.

Or later in the day, you can print a sugar lattice

to complete a cocktail recipe.

Sugar, when it's 3D printed, can also start to really exceed

its usual roles of decoration and sweetening.

This is a wedding cake we designed with Charm City Cakes in Hollywood.

And you can see that once the sugar becomes this structural material,

it can start to define or even support the form of the cake itself.

In this case we decided to 3D print the actual cake stand in sugar,

in addition to the topper, and other decorations,

which is not something you can usually choose to do with frosting.

That's been the most exciting part for us,

expanding what's possible,

pushing the technology of 3D printing into a completely new genre,

and looking for what it can do there that couldn't be done before.

What's important to us

about the sugar parts we've shown you today,

isn't that they're beautiful, but that they were so recently impossible.

We hope you see them as an invitation, maybe even a challenge.

Take 3D printing and apply it somewhere else.

Bring it to a new design space, a new field, a new discipline.

Bring it somewhere that's important to you,

and see how it can expand what's possible there.

That's the best thing about a 3D printer,

you can use it to print something impossible.

Kyle and Liz: Thank you. (Applause)