VisiPrint Combines Material and Model Photos to Offer Better Preview of Your FFF 3D Print Plans
Get a sneak preview at what the finished object will look like before you start rolling out the filament and heating up the print bed.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Princeton University, and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have developed a tool that aims to give fused filament fabrication (FFF, also known as FDM) 3D printer users a better idea of what the finished item will look like: VisiPrint.
"3D printing can be a very wasteful process. Some studies estimate that as much as a third of the material used goes straight to the landfill, often from prototypes the user ends of discarding," says lead author Maxine Perroni-Scharf of the problem the team set out to address. "To make 3D printing more sustainable, we want to reduce the number of tries it takes to get the prototype you want. The user shouldn't have to try out every printing material they have before they settle on a design."
The idea: previewing the object before it's actually printed. That's nothing new: all but the most spartan of slicing software, responsible for turning a 3D model into the two dimensional slices that will be printed layer-by-layer to make the physical 3D object, show a preview of both the model and its slices. VisiPrint goes further, though, by combining an image of the model with an image of the material in which it will be printed.
The team developed VisiPrint in two forms: a standalone variant known as VisiPrint UI, which can be used with any slicer software, and a plugin for Ultimaker's Cura slicer. "We evaluate[d] VisiPrint through a user study showing that it is significantly faster, easier to use, and more faithful than alternatives," the researchers claim. "Within a time limit, participants completed 100% of preview tasks with VisiPrint, compared to 63% with Cura and 13% with Blender."
More information is available on the project website, along with a copy of the paper, which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2026 (CHI '26) later this month, under open-access terms.