Let's say you're designing a switch that must change color when a user activates it. You'd typically think of integrating an LED. But researchers at MIT have developed a low-tech, no-electronics-required way of accomplishing the same. Their process, called ShiftLens, is a way of 3D printing lenticular objects. The idea is that you've got an outer lens layer of transparent material. Beneath that is a pattern layer printed in contrasting colors, in stripes that correspond with the linear lenses of the top layer. Moving the lens layer yields the following effect: The actuating mechanism needn't be a switch: In this example, they've applied it to a cylindrical object, with the use case being a chemical container that lets you know when it's properly sealed: "With our system, an object can tell you whether you are using it properly, without the need for sensors or any complicated electronics," says grad student Yunyi Zhu, of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). "The interactive display is mechanical, so you can create a self-contained, multistate, interactive device that a user can control very intuitively." Zhu and her team developed a design tool that integrates with Rhino and allows the user to apply the ShiftLens process to their own designs. With any luck they'll release it as a plug-in, though they've not announced any plans to do so.

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