World's first 3D prints have been created by researchers by recording echolocation of dolphin. They have recorded a dolphin’s echolocation for the first time, converting it into a visual representation, and have reflected what the animal really sees. In simple terms, the image let researchers look the world through a dolphin’s eyes.

In animals such as bat and dolphins, echolocation is a sensory system wherein emittion ofhigh pitched sounds takes place and is used for find out the direction and distance of the objects. The US and the UK researchers used a device known as ‘CymaScope’ for recording a dolphin’s echolocation sounds set towards particular objects and formed 2-D images from such sounds.

Thereafter, they turned the images into 3D visuals. The first released 3D image in the world was that of a submerged male diver as seen with echolocation of a dolphin.

The inventor of the device CymaScope, John Stuart Reid, said, “When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs. Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object”.

With the help of CymaScope, the researchers were able to record and isolate data when dolphin was echolocating on different objects like a flowerpot, a cube, a ‘+’ symbol and a human. They used 3D Systems and transformed blur images into fairly detailed and more correct 3D prints.