Nature News · Feb 11, 2026 · Collected from RSS
MainPrecise and efficient manufacturing of complex 3D structures is increasingly vital across diverse fields such as structural mechanics3,4,5, photonics6, pharmaceutics7, tissue engineering8,9 and drug screening10. Traditional methods such as moulding11 and phase separation12 are efficient for mass production but prove costly and time-consuming when modifying structures. 3D printing methods such as stereolithography13, digital light processing14,15,16 and two-photon polymerization17,18,19 offer great flexibility in fabricating intricate 3D designs with high precision, although their efficiency is far from enough for mass production. Efforts have been made to enhance the production rate and reduce the layering effects. Continuous liquid interface production20,21 uses oxygen inhibition to avoid reciprocating when printing contiguous layers and integrates a continuous roll for batch production22 but the printing processes are essentially layer-wise. Xolography23 is a form of volumetric additive manufacturing that moves a light sheet through the stationary resin. Despite its recent update with continuous production using a fluid control system24, the dual-colour photoinitiator requires necessary time to revert, which restricts its volumetric build rates.To address this problem, volumetric 3D printing, exemplified by computed axial lithography (CAL)1, emerges as a promising technique to print the entire volume simultaneously using controlled 3D light distributions generated by light patterns from different angles. Because fewer angle numbers used during projection will severely degrade the spatial resolution owing to the missing cone in the frequency domain, akin to computed tomography, present CAL techniques involve the 360° rotation of the sample for high-precision tomographic reconstruction1,25. However, the requirement of sample rotation makes it hard for in situ printing and restricts the rotation speed to avoid mechanical vibrations affecting printing resolution and system alignment. In this case, high-viscosity printing ink is usually required to prevent sample sinking during the tens of seconds printing time for millimetre-scale objects, restricting its possibility of integrating flow control to further improve the printing efficiency1,2,25,26,27,28. Also, when we try to further increase the printing resolution with a high-numerical-aperture (NA) objective for excitation, the diffraction effect of light, once negligible, has now surfaced as a prominent challenge, posing difficulties for maintaining high-precision modulation across a large depth of field29,30,31. Therefore, high-speed, high-throughput successive fabrication of millimetre-scale objects with high resolution remains a systemic challenge.Here we introduce digital incoherent synthesis of holographic light fields, named DISH, to achieve high-speed, high-resolution volumetric printing of millimetre-scale objects within 1 s. Instead of rotating the sample, we design a rotating periscope with a long-working-distance 0.055-NA objective to deliver high-resolution projections of precisely controlled light fields at a rotation speed of up to 10 rotations s−1. Although partially coherent or incoherent light has a shallow depth of field, we use a coherent laser source with a digital micromirror device (DMD) to rapidly generate optimized patterns at up to 17,000 Hz, which can achieve high-resolution modulation even far from the native objective plane without the requirement to mechanically shift the focal plane. Although the DMD cannot directly modulate the phase of the light fields, we develop an iterative algorithm with the wave-optics propagation model and a customized loss function to optimize the projected light fields holographically for high-resolution 3D modulation with enhanced fidelity compared with traditional algorithms. With substantially increased rotating speed and resolution over traditional CAL methods, DISH becomes very sensitive to system errors such as system misalignment, aberration and attenuation. Therefore, we develop an adaptive-optics-based rapid calibration method to achieve a uniform optical resolution of 11 µm across 1-cm depth experimentally, enabling high-speed production of samples with the finest positive feature of 12 µm and a stable printing resolution of 19 µm (Extended Data Fig. 1). Different materials in a range of viscosities are validated to be compatible with DISH. By using both advantages of high efficiency and high precision, we integrate DISH with a fluidic channel to demonstrate successive flexible production of complex and diverse 3D structures within low-viscosity materials, which may open up a horizon for diverse applications such as high-throughput bioprinting, drug screening, micromachines and miniaturized photonics.Principle of DISHTo avoid the instability of high-speed sample rotation in traditional CAL methods, we develop a rotating periscope in DISH to facilitate high-speed projections of light fields at up to 10 rotations s−1 (Fig. 1a,b and Extended Data Fig. 2). A DMD is used to generate high-resolution light modulation at speeds up to 17,000 Hz. The periscope is placed in front of the objective, altering the propagation direction of patterned beams. The DMD patterns are synchronized accurately with the rotation angles for incoherent synthesis of 3D light intensity distributions (Extended Data Fig. 3). By rapidly changing the illumination angles, DISH makes use of the motor’s rotation speed as the primary determinant of exposure time. All beams are projected through the single flat surface of a container to generate 3D patterns, simplifying requirements on the printing container and facilitating applications such as in situ printing on specific objects or in vivo bioprinting. Our experimental validation reveals that DISH can finish the 3D printing of a millimetre-scale object within only 0.6 s in a polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) aqueous solution (Fig. 1c and Supplementary Video 1). In traditional CAL methods, high-viscosity (6,000–10,000 cP) photosensitive materials are required to alleviate the effect of product sinking32 owing to the printing time lasting tens of seconds. The ultrahigh printing speed of DISH can effectively mitigate these limitations and work for low-viscosity materials of 4.7 cP, accomplishing printing before sample sinking.Fig. 1: Principle and illustration of DISH.a, Multi-angle projection is used to generate 3D light intensity distributions within a fixed container for volumetric printing. b, A rotating periscope is designed to generate high-speed rotating projections of the light patterns modulated by a DMD within 0.6 s. The target model and its experimental printout are shown on the right as an example. c, Images captured at different time points showing that the printing process in a low-viscosity PEGDA aqueous solution can be finished within 0.6 s. d, Comparisons of the simulated 3D light distributions generated by the DISH system with incoherent light, coherent light without holographic optimization and coherent light with holographic optimization. The target ground truth is also shown on the left. Scale bars, 1 mm.Full size imageTo further increase the printing resolution, we use a long-working-distance objective lens with a 0.055 NA for light projection. However, with the increase in resolution, the diffraction effect of light cannot be ignored by simply using the ray approximation. For partially coherent or incoherent light typically used in previous CAL methods, axial scanning will be required to cover a large volume range owing to the shallow depth of field with a high NA (about 0.4 mm for 0.055 NA at 405 nm), which will reduce the printing speed for millimetre-scale objects to maintain high resolution (Fig. 1d). In DISH, we address this problem by using a coherent laser source and holographically calculating and optimizing the light fields, which can achieve high-resolution modulation far beyond the native objective plane without mechanically shifting the focal plane. Combined with the high-speed digital modulation of the DMD, we can achieve high-resolution 3D light modulations across a large depth range up to 1 cm after specifically designed optimization, more than 20 times larger than the depth of field. Multi-angular excitation also offers sufficient degrees of freedom to generate high-resolution 3D intensity distributions by DMD modulation during optimization.Holographic light fields optimizationDifferent from the optimization process in CAL methods33,34,35,36,37,38 using ray approximations for the light field, a coarse-to-fine iterative algorithm is developed for DISH to optimize the binary projection patterns in the DMD using the wave-optics model for coherent light. The projection patterns for different angles are summed incoherently to generate the 3D high-resolution intensity distributions for high-fidelity printing after considering the response of the photocuring materials39, which can be expressed as the following optimization problem:$$\left\{\begin{array}{cc}\min & L={\sum }_{\vec{x}\in A}{|{d}_{{\rm{h}}}-D(\vec{x})|}^{2}+{\sum }_{\vec{x}\in \widetilde{A}}{|D(\vec{x})-{d}_{{\rm{l}}}|}^{2}\\ {\rm{s}}.{\rm{t}}. & I={\sum }_{\varphi }\,{|{{\mathcal{H}}}_{\varphi }({\delta }_{\varphi }u)|}^{2},\,{\delta }_{\varphi }\in \{0,1\}\end{array}\right.,$$in which \(D(\vec{x})\) represents the accumulated dose at each 3D point in the objective area, which is determined by the intensity of the patterned beams I, exposure time and light attenuation in materials. A represents the 3D region of the target model to be printed, in which the accumulated dose is expected to be dh for polymerization, and \(\widetilde{A}\) represents the area outside the target region in which the accumulated dose is supposed to be smaller than the threshold dl to avoid overexposure. \({\delta }_{\varphi }u\) is the DMD-projected amplitudes for the angle φ. \({{\mathcal{H}}}_{\varphi }