The 3d printer in our office (an Objet Connex500) prints with a rigid, semitransparent white material that can be used to create these unique black and white photographic prints. These prints may be indecipherable when viewed from the side, but when backlit with a diffuse light, they recreate images with surprisingly high precision and even add some subtle dimensionality and texture to the scene.
By varying the thickness of a region of this semitransparent print you can control the amount of light that is able to pass through, thereby controlling the brightness (thinner regions of material will appear brighter and thicker regions darker). In this project, I've converted each individual greyscale pixel of an image to thickness, allowing me to precisely reproduce any greyscale image. BCI Adult Finger Clip Spo2 Sensor The photos I've printed include an adorable picture my mom took of our cat Teddy (fig 4), Saturn and its moon Titan taken by the Cassini space probe (fig 5 and 6), and a huge print (19x16") of Mt. Williamson by Ansel Adams (fig 1, 2, and 3).
All of these 3D models were generated algorithmically from Processing using the ModelBuilder library by Marius Watz. This library allows you to save 3D geometries in the STL file format, STL files that form a watertight mesh can be printed by a 3D printer.
To get started using this code yourself, download the latest version of the ModelBuilder library, unzip the file, and copy the folder into Processing's "libraries" folder. If you have installed the predecessor to the ModelBuilder library (called the Unlekker library), you will need to delete it. Once this is done restart Processing.