× Thanks for reading! Log in to continue. Enjoy more articles by logging in or creating a free account. No credit card required. Log in Sign up {{featured_button_text}}

For most of us,“3-D” means the cheap pair of glasses that they give you at the movie theater that make the shark on the screen look like it’s going to eat you.

Three-dimensional printing seems even more of a novelty — a large machine, much bigger than a paper copier, recreating in plastic filament, not ink, mostly small objects.

Perhaps that’s why it’s hard to grasp the reality of a 3-D printed car. But this weekend you might get the chance to get behind the wheel of one, on display at the Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News.

Every couple of years, the sprawling U.S. Department of Energy nuclear physics research facility, home to the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, holds a free, all-day open house to introduce the public at large to cutting-edge science, which may seem like science fiction to some.

The goal is to educate parents and their children to what goes on at the lab, and hopefully encourage an interest in science that lasts a lifetime. The last open house, in 2014, drew 7,000 visitors.

“We have a lot of people who drive past Jeff Lab and aren’t quite sure what’s in that place,” said Andrew Hutton, a British-born physicist who is associate director of Jeff Lab’s Accelerator Division.