Six Volumetric 3D Printing Projects to Watch in 2026

Most 3D printing still works the same way: a nozzle or laser builds an object one thin layer at a time. Volumetric printing rejects that entirely. It cures an entire object inside a vat of photosensitive resin at once, more like a hologram materializing in three dimensions than anything we normally call printing. The concept emerged from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore research in 2019, and since then a handful of labs across Europe and Asia have been pushing it into practical use.

The appeal is obvious. Objects that take hours to print conventionally can be cured in seconds, with no visible layer lines and almost no support structures needed. That opens doors in bioprinting, optics, and rapid prototyping. These six projects, spanning research labs and government-funded consortia, show how far the technique has come in the last year.

DISH at Tsinghua University: Sub-Second Printing with Spinning Light

A team at Tsinghua published DISH in Nature in 2026 after five years of development. The system uses a high-speed rotating periscope to project holographic light patterns from a 405 nm laser into a stationary resin bath, curing entire millimeter-scale objects in 0.6 seconds at 19 micrometer resolution. Because the resin stays still, the technique works with thinner materials than conventional volumetric printers, which keeps prints sharp.

The team demonstrated DISH across engineering components, photonic devices, and GelMA bioprinting scaffolds, suggesting the method could span industrial and medical use cases as it matures.

MTV at TU Eindhoven: Predicting Prints Before They Happen

Volumetric printing is fast, but it is still unpredictable. Material variations inside the resin vat can throw off resolution and mechanical properties in ways that are hard to diagnose after the fact. The MTV project at Eindhoven University of Technology is building computational models that predict exactly how a print will turn out before it is made, accounting for how material variations affect strength and precision.

The consortium includes imaging company Motion Imager and runs through 2030 with just over one million euros in Dutch government funding. The goal is to replace trial and error with a repeatable process that industrial users can trust.

TVAM at EPFL: A Life-Sized Printed Ear

Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne published a breakthrough in Light: Science and Applications in May 2026. Their technique modulates the phase of laser light rather than its brightness, sculpting cells with 70 times less optical power than earlier methods. Using just a 150 mW laser diode, the team solidified a 64 mm3 construct: a life-sized human ear made of gelatin-based resin with embedded living human cells. Six days later, those cells had survived and begun forming organized networks.

That is a step toward bioprinted implants for reconstructive medicine. The team is now working toward denser cell populations and eventually printing directly onto existing tissue.

SONOCRAFT in Barcelona: Beating Heart Tissue

The SONOCRAFT project, coordinated by the University of Barcelona, combines volumetric printing with ultrasonic particle manipulation. Sound waves position and align cardiac cells while the volumetric process builds the surrounding structure, creating centimeter-scale cardiac tissue with integrated artificial vasculature. The Horizon Europe-backed consortium runs through 2029 with nearly three million euros in funding and seven partner institutions across Spain, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Switzerland.

The goal is not just to print tissue, but to build constructs that behave like native heart tissue for drug testing and regenerative medicine.

Bioxolography at ETH Zurich: Engineering Skeletal Muscle

Conventional bioprinting places cells, but it struggles to control how those cells are oriented. Muscle function depends on architecture, so that is a problem. A Sinergia project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation has been tackling this with bioxolography, a light-based volumetric printing technique that gives researchers control over cell orientation during the print itself.

The ETH Zurich-led consortium includes Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Basel, and volumetric printing spinout xolo. Machine learning guides the biofabrication pipeline as they work toward skeletal muscle tissue models that replicate the performance of native muscle.

OpenCAL V2.0: An Open-Source Volumetric Printer

On the hardware side, the OpenCAL project soft-launched its second version in June 2026 with a complete build guide hosted on Printables. The project partnered with Prusa on a design competition and with Formlabs to produce a ready-to-use photopolymer resin formulated specifically for continuous-axial-lithography printing, distributed through MatterHackers.

OpenCAL removes one of the biggest barriers to volumetric printing adoption: the lack of accessible hardware and materials. Anyone with a 3D printer and basic electronics skills can now build their own system and source compatible resin off the shelf.

Volumetric printing is not replacing conventional FDM or SLA anytime soon. What these projects show is a technology finding its niches. Speed and precision are not the only advantages. The absence of layer lines and the ability to print around living cells without shear stress make volumetric printing uniquely suited for certain applications. The question is whether any of these labs can scale beyond research into commercial products within the next few years.