They've been used to create everything from coat hangers and instruments to cars and cups and clocks, and a number of engineers have been working to develop them as virtual chefs.

This is easier to do for food that still has to be cooked afterwards, like breadsticks or ravioli than something that's already hot and ready to eat.

But the U.

S University has been experimenting with the cooking process in an effort to make three D printed food something you can machine yourself at home.

E.

Try to imagine what your kitchen will look like in 10 years.

You might have an extra appliance that it doesn't have today, and that would be, ah, food printer.

Or maybe it would be a sexier name for it, but it allows you to do things you can't do today.

It's easy to dismiss three D printing food as a novelty, but at Columbia's Creative Machines Lab, they're predicting that your future kitchen may have a three D printer.

Right now, what comes out of the machines isn't cooked.

So the teams trying to figure out the best way to cook food as it prints Why do you need to incorporate lasers into three D printing of food?

So lasers offer you much higher resolution with cooking as opposed to conventional cooking methods, like using an oven but a laser.

It gives you that accuracy and the resolution and precision you need, because now it's a pinpoint of energy that you can control where it goes to show me how this works.

This guy's just browning the top, and it only cooks about just under a millimeter of dough on the top, which doesn't sound like a lot.

But again, if you think about how these how this will be used on a three D food printer, you're only laying it out about a millimeter two of food, so you only really need to cook 1 to 2 millimeters.

It's the start of turning three D food printing into a consumer product we're talking about, like printing like Google.

A lot of people have this kind of misconception that this is sort of Frankenstein food, right?

Its's doesn't seem so appetizing ingredients that you put into a food printer our flour water.

It's kind of like E having your own chef in a way that really knows everything that your body wants.

That's this magical combination of having sort of a personalized chef but also having it relatively low cost and made on the spot.

I think when when I talked about people about footprint and the first thing is like Oh, you know, way make a cake, or can we make a You know, some carrots like Sure, you could do those things, But what would you want to do that when you have a machine that could pretty much make any combination of flavors?

Thanks so much better than just like playing carrots.