> Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. > The prototype chip has no moving parts > The beam projects up into a liquid resin

> Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. > The prototype chip has no moving parts > The beam projects up into a liquid resin Translated: Imagine a portable 3D printer with a small chip, a wat of liquid resin, a wash bath and a curing booth, you could drag around on wheels. But please only think about the chip in your palm. > When powered by an off-chip laser, the antennas emit a steerable beam of visible light into the well of photocurable resin. Oh, right, it also needs a laser. > The researchers use electrical signals to nonmechanically steer the light beam, causing the resin to solidify wherever the beam strikes it. That's so cool. It's almost like an LCD used in today's printers? > Instead, the researchers used liquid crystal to fashion compact modulators they integrate onto the chip. [---] The researchers actively tune the modulators using an electric field, which reorients the liquid crystal molecules in a certain direction. Right. So they reinvented reflective LCDs? > In the end, the group used their prototype to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional shapes within seconds. 3D print arbitrary 2D shapes? So worse than current printers? If there was something interesting done with this research, this article did a very poor job of showing it.