One step closer to Star Trek: New 3-D printer builds with 10 materials at once

Most 3-D printers use a single material to fabricate objects. For consumer 3-D printers, that generally means some kind of plastic or resin. But using only one kind of material means 3-D printers are limited in the kinds of objects they can create. There are 3-D printers that can use multiple materials, but they can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting them out of reach for almost everyone besides engineers and developers. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wanted to find a way to create a more affordable multi-material 3-D printer, and thus the MultiFab was born.