Lab Tour in Shibaura Institute of Technology Manabe Lab.

①About this interview

I am Riku, the team leader. We had the pleasure of interviewing Manabe Laboratory at Shibaura Institute of Technology through an introduction by Uchida senior, who was vice president of our club, the Dengiken, at the time in 2019.

②Tour of the Manabe Laboratory

This time, we were introduced to Mr. Suzuki and Mr. Uchida, two of our seniors. What surprised me when I joined the lab was the wide variety of 3D printers. The Dengiken has two types of 3D printers, but the Manabe Lab has five types of 3D printers, including the Form3 (optical fabrication), which costs nearly one million yen, and even Yutaro, a first-year junior high school student, could sense the aura of the place (his nervousness increased...).We also got to see Mr. Suzuki's research on "transfer foil using a 3D printer"! The photo below shows the Shibaura Institute of Technology's school emblem made from actual research. Since silver transfer foil conduct electricity, this is a tremendous research project that can produce substrates and other products using this technology. According to Mr. Suzuki, there were still many difficulties at first, and there were many failures (see title's photo), but as a result of trial and error, he was able to create such a beautiful product. To the untrained eye, the quality seemed very high, but according to Mr. Suzuki, it is not yet perfect (too high...). We've seen valuable research that will change the way future board making is done!

③VR/AR experience at Manabe Lab

Apart from covering 3D printers, we experienced VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality).In VR, it was a dream come true, where you could greet girls on a small island and jump endlessly...!VR can create things that cannot be reproduced in reality. It was a really interesting experience. In AR, things pop out in reality... I was allowed to play a shooting game like this. Both were strange, like they were real and not real (very difficult to explain...). I was very surprised when I saw these two. Some of you may not understand the difference between VR and AR here. The critical difference is in the "world in which we are”. As mentioned earlier, VR transforms the entire environment around you into a virtual world because it allows you to create things that are not real.AR, on the other hand, as the name suggests, augments reality, i.e., the real world is the main subject. It is like a creation appearing in that real world. Both were cutting-edge technologies that would create the future alongside 3D printers.