The Future of 5DOF Laser Cutting Is Personal

There has been a recent advent of diode-based laser cutters and a significant uptake among makers. In this paper, we reason that this new technology will also lower the bar for making laser cutters capable of tilting their heads, creating the opportunity to bring 5DOF laser cutting to makers. We anticipate this evolution and present a prototype of a diode-based 5DOF laser cutter built on technology available to makers today. Using this prototype, we explore how to embed 5DOF cutting into makers’ existing software ecosystem to ease adoption. We tackle this by starting from a popular toolchain and then, step-by-step, extending every program, file format, and workflow to 5DOF: We present a 5DOF variant of SVG, we extend Adobe Illustrator with a plugin, and we present a converter for 3D models. We then use our prototype and toolchain to explore what future makers might fabricate using such machines, including hidden joints that provide models with a clean look, load-bearing joints that take 5.8x times higher loads, and cut-in-place mechanisms.

Publication

Antonius Naumann, Chiao Fang, Lukas Rambold, Martin Taraz, Tom Haas, Jonas Baron, Katharina Posegga, Edgar Bennemann, Corvin Kögler, Leonard Del Federico, Julian Arnold, Gustav Ahlgrimm, Shohei Katakura, Muhammad Abdullah, Robert Kovacs, and Patrick Baudisch. 2026.
The Future of 5DOF Laser Cutting Is Personal. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'26)

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