Of all innovations adopted by the maker community within the past couple of decades, one stands among the rest on top for anything regarding manufacturing. It goes without saying here at Hackaday how many projects have been reliant on using the technology to turn their ideas into reality. 3D printing has been a maker community invention and, in return, has expanded this hacky community into something that anyone with an imagination can get into. It also goes without saying that the layer-based tech imposes limits on what we can actually create: think overhangs and layer adhesion. However, there’s a possibility that a recent offshoot of this scrappy community has the power to eliminate some of these faults.

Volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) is a young technology that has a similar start to many new tech toys, including the original SLA of the first 3D printers. That is expensive and completely stuck in the laboratory… Fortunately, that’s not where 3D printing as a whole stayed, as the RepRap project managed to bring the obscure technology to the hobbyists’ main stage. An entire group of people formed and spent countless hours until the useless pieces of poorly extruded plastic could form parts impossible to make with anything else. A cool quirk of history is that it likes to repeat: examples spur recreation, and this appears to be happening with the technology found within VAM printing.

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