Here at 3D Rapid Print, one of the fastest growing 3D Printing companies in the Thames Valley, we like to keep abreast of the latest innovations in 3D printing.
On January 27th 2022, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spoke of PhD student Mustafa Doga Dogan’s project to develop barcodes embedded in 3D printed objects called InfraredTags, which would show metadata in a similar manner to information embedded in digital files. (For example, with a photo this could include when and where the picture was taken.) MIT argued that barcodes can be removed, detached or otherwise eventually become unreadable; in contrast, they contended that InfraredTags were far more durable and being embedded within an object made them unobtrusive.
In late 2020, Dogan took inspiration from a new smartphone model that had an infrared (IR) camera that could see through certain materials opaque to visible light. In 2021, Dogan spent circa 2 months researching suitable materials, eventually finding a small German company that could make a customised 3D printing filament opaque to visible light, but transparent or translucent to IR light.
Dogan and his colleagues at MIT created several prototypes to demonstrate their concept, including 3D printed mugs with IR camera readable barcodes engraved inside them, a prototype WiFi router and a cheap, wheel-shaped video game controller. The WiFi router had invisible tags that would show the network’s name or password depending on the angle it was viewed from; the video game controller worked via an embedded 2-dimensional barcode and had no electronic parts at all, such that a player would simply turn the wheel and a $20 IR camera could determine the wheel’s spatial orientation.
The team also developed a user interface to specify exactly what the tag should look like and where it should be within an object, enabling multiple tags to be placed in the same object to make it easier to access information if views of the object from certain angles were obstructed. MIT argued that if the use of similar tags eventually became widespread, the masses could use their phones to do things such as switching lights on and off, controlling the volume of a speaker and regulating the temperature on a thermostat.
The team’s research is intended to be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems between April 30th and May 6th and published in the conference proceedings. For further work, Dogan and his colleagues are investigating the concept of adding IR cameras to augmented reality headsets.
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Disclaimer: Featured image of “QR Code – Castel Gandolfo – DSC04245” has been dedicated to the public domain by its author (known only as Daderot) under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
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