âHair Club for Menâ has competition!
Did they credit a certain presidential candidate for inspiration?
You must be working wit a very loose definition of hair-like.
Itâs about damn time. My robot dogâs been shedding nothing all over the house for too long!
Instead of using conventional computer-aided design (CAD) software to draw thousands of individual hairs on a computer â a step that would take hours to compute â the team built a new software platform, called âCilllia,â that lets users define the angle, thickness, density, and height of thousands of hairs, in just a few minutes.
I have a newsflash for you, MIT. No one was making hair in CG a strand at a time even before you wrote your software.
Instead of using conventional computer-aided design (CAD) software to draw thousands of individual stars on a computer - a process that would cost millions of dollars - the team built a new software platform, called âStarburst,â that is expected to one day bring the cost of screensavers to within reach of the average computer user.
Seven whole comments until a Trump joke. sighâŚWeâre losing our mojo people.
I for one donât welcome our cyborg Trump overlords.
I took the second comment as a trump joke.
Yup. Missed that one. @anon29631895 redeems us 
Tomorrow I better see a headline that says MIT develops the worlds most advanced basting brush.
Did I?
We need to see it in a microscope or at least get one filament to rub between your fingers. If the filament moves in one direction when itâs between your fingers which are rubbing back and forth along the length of the strand, then itâs kinda like hair. If not, then itâs just a tube.
Gâhead, try it with a strand of natural hair.
Yeah, but incidentally enough. I wouldnât want to try and dye it after manufacture. They show a micrograph at http://www.fastcodesign.com/3059931/making-it/mit-is-building-touchable-interfaces-out-of-soft-synthetic-hair and have an LED backed tuft deciding whether it likes the way itâs being petted. So, less pressure during the summer to quantitate suckage before doing something? On the other hand the cilia moving around a pellet arenât coated in robophlegm and coughing into their yellow-gold nanotube feedstock hopper, just nudging it in circles.
Kind of looking forward to the plushcycle and riding that over a bridge of octopus to Hawaii. Little swarm of camera drones to follow, weird tickle agents and threats implied by the gameraâŚuh, camera angles.
The original MIT article is a bit better.
If you go to your conventional 3D printer and press the âTrump Wigâ button, the machine would need a complete blueprint for where every voxel was to be placed. This would take a lot of data. So, as I understand it, they have modified the software so you can map a texture onto the surface, and the hair geometry is calculated as the printing progresses. This is a bit like rendering a house shape with a few polygons, and then wrapping a brick texture onto it. The neat bit is working out how many parameters they need to define the hair - straight and parallel, or a bit wavy or clumpy - and getting that to work the same at different angles.
I donât think they have enough resolution to get the scaley pattern on the surface of the hair for thaumatechniciaâs rubbing trick.
Meh. Donât see why this is so amazing. Someone beat them to it 20+ years ago:
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