Illusory Material

3D printed optical textiles

"Illusory Material" is the world's first 3D printed textile that integrates tiny optical lenses with colored resins to create dynamic physical materials. This "dream-like" textile with unique material expressions only existed in the digital world before and can never be achieved in traditional manufacturing. With the computational workflow we designed, optical textiles can be applied on any shape and surface, which opens up a new era of interactive CMF without electrical input. It can be printed on both hard and flexible material, creating a new material organization that responds directly to the user intervention or the environment.