What happens when you put an LED on the end of a 3D printer instead of an extruder that spits out formable material? Not a lot -- at least, not a lot that's immediately visible to the naked eye. As Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi has shown, however, you can get some pretty spectacular results when you pair that 3D printer with a camera set for a long exposure.

His idea was to take the process known as "light painting" a considerable step further than most, effectively using the 3D printer as a robotic arm to precisely map out an image in the air -- in this case, a 3D scan of his daughter's face -- instead of having someone wave a light around to create an abstract image. What's more, by using an RGB LED, he was able to create a full-color image that, on video, looks like an image slowly rendering on a low-res computer. screen.

See for yourself below -- and, as Ekaggrat himself teases in the comments for the video, "stay tuned" for more.

[via Gizmodo]