Print-and-Play Fabrication

Have you ever wanted to build your own smart object—something that could sense you, respond to your actions, maybe even change shape—but then hit that wall where you realize you’d need to learn electronics, programming, CAD, and maybe a little physics just to get started? Yeah, same. That frustration was the starting point for my PhD, and it’s what led me to develop Print-and-Play Fabrication: a new approach to making interactive devices that you can just print and use—no soldering iron or Raspberry Pi required.

Print-and-Play Fabrication is a digital fabrication paradigm where devices that sense, compute, and respond are fully 3D-printed in one go. The goal is to remove the barriers that have historically kept interactive hardware in the hands of experts. Instead of assembling a bunch of fiddly components or calibrating machine learning models every time you want to make a thing interactive, why not just hit “print,” pop out your object, and start playing?

To explore this idea, I developed four different techniques that each tackle a slice of the interactivity puzzle:

AirTouch – Touch-Sensitive Devices Without Electronics Link to heading

This one lets you create 3D-printed objects that can sense where they’re being touched—without using any electronics or wiring inside the model. It works by redirecting airflow through specially designed internal tubes. When you cover a specific hole on the surface (like pressing the bunny’s nose 🐰), the pressure changes inside, and a barometric sensor picks that up. Since each hole is a different size, the pressure change is unique and tells us exactly where the touch happened. Oh, and it supports up to 12 touch points, can be made fully transparent (!), and doesn’t need per-object calibration.

Blowhole – Interaction Powered by Breath Link to heading

Next, I wanted to get rid of the external electronics entirely. Enter Blowhole, which turns your breath into an input mechanism. It embeds little acoustically tuned cavities inside objects, so when you gently blow on a hole, it produces a unique whistle. Your phone or computer listens and identifies which hole was activated based on the frequency of the sound. It’s like playing a flute, but the flute is a 3D-printed interactive whale. Seriously.

AirLogic – Printed Logic Gates Using Air Link to heading

Then I started thinking… could we 3D-print computation itself? Like, logic gates and everything? Turns out we can. AirLogic is a toolkit of air-powered widgets—buttons, switches, AND/OR/NOT gates, and more—that lets you embed basic logic operations directly into your printed model. Everything’s powered by air jets, and because these components are stateless, there’s no need to reset them—they just work when air flows through. You can even design your whole interactive experience with Lego-style AirLogic pieces before committing to a final model. It’s like redstone from Minecraft, but in real life and way cooler.

MorpheesPlug – Shape-Changing Devices Link to heading

Finally, MorpheesPlug tackles physical output. With a set of pneumatically actuated “widgets” (think accordion, spiral, bump, etc.), you can make printed objects that morph their shape when air is pumped in. Imagine a phone case that inflates when it rains, or a cushion that corrects your posture if you slouch—both of which we built. MorpheesPlug comes with its own design software and supports seven types of shape-change, so you can play with movement, curvature, even haptic feedback, right out of the printer.

What ties all these together is a central theme: air. It’s free, safe, well-studied, and turns out to be a fantastic medium for enabling interaction—whether by detecting pressure, carrying sound, or powering movement. More importantly, all these techniques rely on well-understood physical principles (like Bernoulli’s or Helmholtz resonance), which means we can build reliable interactions without retraining models or wiring things up every time.

Print-and-Play Fabrication shows that interactive devices don’t have to be complicated or intimidating. By shifting the complexity into the geometry of the print itself, we can empower anyone with a 3D printer to create objects that respond, compute, and adapt—right off the print bed.

You bring the idea. The printer handles the rest.