April 30, 2014 2 min read

When we heard about the pen that allows you to doodle in three dimensions, we first thought, “Huh?!?” And then we thought, “Cool!”

Turns out, we weren’t alone.

The Lix 3-D Pen surpassed its funding goal of 30,000 pounds – or about $50,000 -- on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter within two hours of going live. Now in its second day, the campaign has raised almost $250,000.

Doodling in 3-D may be a hard concept to get your brain around. It helps if you watch the video below. The Lix pen is smaller and more nimble than the larger, bulkier first-generation 3-D printing pens. The gadget melts plastic and cools it rapidly so that the user can move his or her hand around in space and leave a line.

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The device was created by a team of three inventors in Europe -- Delphine Eloise Wood, Anton Suvorov, and Ismail Baran -- and the company is headquartered in London. The challenge for the team was to make existing 3-D printing technology smaller.

“ The technology which is used in Lix Pen was developed from scratch. Our main goal was to create a professional tool which is easy to use and will have a high comfort,” the team wrote on the Kickstarter campaign. “ The most difficult problem for us was to reduce the size of the mechanical parts, reposition them and let them work together.”

As part of the Lix fundraise, a pledge of approximately $70 will get a customer a single 3-D printing pen. For about $135, a customer will get a single Lix 3-D printing pen and three bags of plastic -- essentially, the pen's "ink" -- to use in creating works with the pen.

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