Every additive process a maker has ever touched, from FDM to resin DLP to two-photon lithography, shares one assumption: you build a 3D object out of 2D slices, one after another, in sequence. A team at the University of Utah just broke that assumption. Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Rajesh Menon, the group built a printer that solidifies an entire three-dimensional object from a single laser exposure lasting about 20 seconds — no stage movement, no slice-by-slice scanning, no galvanometer sweeping a beam across hundreds of layers. One flash, one finished part.
The catch, and it's a significant one for anyone picturing this replacing their Bambu Lab or Form printer next year, is scale. The technique currently works on microstructures with features as small as 6 micrometers, not on hobbyist-sized prints. But the underlying trick is worth understanding, because it points at where fast, high-resolution volumetric printing is headed, and because the core insight — that a print can be encoded entirely in the shape of a single light field rather than in a sequence of instructions to a moving stage — is not inherently tied to any one length scale, even if the optics needed to pull it off at desktop scale don't exist yet.
How You Print a Whole Object at Once
Conventional laser-based resin printing, whether it's stereolithography or two-photon polymerization, still works the way a dot-matrix printer works: trace a pattern, cure it, move, repeat, layer after layer, for as long as it takes to build up the full height of the part. For complex microstructures with fine internal features, that can mean hours of continuous laser scanning with other laser-based printing techniques.
Menon's team, working with lab member Dajun Lin, replaced the scanning step with a hologram. According to the university's announcement, the printer uses a nanoscale mask — a nanopatterned lens engineered to compensate for the substrate's own diffraction — to reshape a single laser beam into a complete three-dimensional holographic light pattern in one pass. That pattern is projected directly into a solid substrate of SU-8, a common epoxy-based photoresist used throughout microfabrication, and the material crosslinks wherever the light intensity crosses the curing threshold as the laser passes through the substrate itself. Because the entire 3D intensity field exists simultaneously in space, the whole object cures essentially at once, in the roughly 20 seconds it takes to expose the resist, rather than being built up slice by slice.
It's a conceptual cousin of volumetric printing techniques like tomographic printing (where a rotating vial is exposed from many angles simultaneously), but instead of using rotation and back-projected 2D images, the Utah approach front-loads all the geometric complexity into the diffractive mask itself. Design the mask correctly, and the physics of diffraction does the rest of the work in a single exposure.
What They Actually Printed
The demonstration piece wasn't a simple blob — the team printed microtubule assemblies with diameters as small as 6 micrometers and aspect ratios up to 120:1, meaning individual features that are 120 times longer than they are wide. That's a genuinely hard geometry to hold together with any fabrication process, since thin, long structures are prone to collapsing, warping, or breaking during development and handling. The team also demonstrated that liquid could move through the printed structures via capillary action, showing the microtubules function as actual fluidic channels rather than just solid decorative geometry.
That fluidic capability is the tell for where this is headed: lab-on-a-chip devices, microfluidic sensors, and biomedical scaffolding are the obvious early beneficiaries of a process that can produce working capillary channels in seconds instead of hours. The research was published in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-73975-4), and the announcement was also covered in VoxelMatters' July 8 report on the study.
What It Means for Makers
Nobody is going to load an SU-8 vat into their desktop printer this year, or arguably this decade — this is a micrometer-scale, cleanroom-adjacent process that depends on custom diffractive optics fabricated for a specific target geometry. That's a fundamentally different workflow from slicing an STL and hitting print. Each new object shape likely requires a new mask, at least in this generation of the technology, which is a real constraint compared to the general-purpose flexibility of a slicer that can handle arbitrary geometry.
But the speed number is the headline for a reason. A process that collapses hours of laser scanning into 20 seconds isn't just a lab curiosity — it's the kind of throughput improvement that historically has preceded a technology's move from research bench to production tool. Two-photon lithography systems for micro-optics and biomedical devices are already commercial products from companies serving photonics and microfluidics markets; a technique that prints the same class of parts in a single flash rather than a raster scan is the sort of improvement that vendors in that space will be watching closely, and likely trying to license or replicate.
For makers working at the macro scale — FDM, resin DLP, SLA — the direct relevance today is close to zero. You won't see holographic phase masks in a consumer resin printer anytime soon; the fabrication cost and precision required for the mask alone puts this well outside desktop budgets, and a mask baked for one geometry can't simply be reused for the next design the way a slicer profile can. Where this matters is as a signal: the layer-by-layer paradigm that has defined every consumer and prosumer 3D printer since the technology existed is not actually a law of physics, it's an engineering default that's already being challenged at small scales. Volumetric and holographic approaches — this one included — are the research seedbed for whatever eventually breaks the speed ceiling on large-format resin and light-based printing too. If you're curious where the next decade of print-speed breakthroughs is coming from, it's this class of research, not another spring in a linear rail.
