As 3D printing technology becomes more accessible, one factor still limits your creativity: the size of the printer.

A 3D printer can't print anything bigger than itself. So if you want to 3D print a chair, you would need a chair-sized printer.

Marcelo Coelho and Skylar Tibbits, two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have developed a new method. Their system, Hyperform, works by rendering your design in a 2D line. The object prints as a thin chain. After it’s printed, you fold it into place to create your object, almost like origami.

Your small 3D printer no longer has to get in the way of your big 3D dreams.

Using this new method, the duo created a chandelier eight times larger than the print bed it was produced on, Coelho told Mashable. There's no maximum length, either; researchers printed one as tall as a five-story building.

Coelho explained that folding the printed chain is intuitive — the material will only snap in the direction that it's designed to be folded in.

"You know how IKEA furniture comes with an assembly manual, and you follow the directions to put your furniture together? Well, the assembly manual is embedded in the chain itself. It knows exactly how to be assembled," he said. There's virtually no way to mess it up.

While the current method requires a human to fold the object into place, we could see a self-folding Hyperform in the future. Tibbits recently led MIT's 4D printing project, where researchers developed objects that fold themselves when submerged in water.

Tibbits said that the concept is possible, and they are working to expand the possibilities with their previous work. But a great deal of development work is still necessary before the two technologies could meet.

Image: Vimeo, Skylar Tibbits