long term vision to digitally fabricate high fidelity, highly
customized, ‘ready-to-go’ devices will be a powerful enabling
technology for HCI research. Although much of this
novel technology is still in the research stage [7, 26, 33],
the simplest forms of 3D printing are rapidly entering the
mainstream. A recent cover story in The Economist suggests
3D printing is the manufacturing technology to “change the
world” [32]. A host of consumer-level 3D printing devices
are now available and the fundamental photopolymer printing
technology behind Printed Optics has been demonstrated
for less than $200 parts cost [21]. It is reasonable to expect
that inexpensive optical 3D printers will be available to researchers
in the very near future.