For the past two years, a company called Carbon3D has been secretly developing a new type of 3D printing—one that would be far faster than polyjet, stereolithography and selective laser sintering. This week they pulled the sheets off, and it looks pretty nuts.

Called CLIP, for Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the technology combines elements of SLA with a photochemical process, and the result is that parts are not so much printed—that is, they're not laid down/cured/sintered one layer at a time—so much as they are grown, out of what seems an impossibly shallow dish of liquid:

It looks even more eerie when producing a taller object:



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It works by combining photochemical curing processes with precisely controlled flows of oxygen drifting through the liquid resin. Oxygen stymies the curing process, and Carbon3D's proprietary technology can place the oxygen precisely in the negative space of your part while the UV light they hit it with cures everything else.