Habitat for Humanity of Windsor-Essex has announced that it will build Canada’s first 3D-printed home in Leamington, Ontario, just across the border with Detroit.

Habitat is collaborating on this project with the University of Windsor-Essex and InvestWindsorEssex (IWE), a non-profit development organization managed by the County of Essex and the City of Windsor. Some funding is also provided through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Innovation Fund.

habitat It is one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world and one of the largest private home builders in America. This organization has also quickly become one of the major adopters of additive construction for house construction. As of last fall, Habitat has printed homes in several US states and funded a company that prints homes in India.

Habitat will print a group of four tiny houses, each measuring about 46 square metres. It’s still unclear what machine the homes will be printed on, but for the US projects, Habitat and its partners used COBOD’s BOD2 printers.

The highlight of this project is that IWE used CAD models to create a virtual reality (VR) environment for the homes to be built by Habitat. In this way, design errors should be identified and corrected in advance. For simulation, the team relied on the Unity software platform, which was originally developed for video game development. According to Stephen Mackenzie, President and CEO of IWE, VR not only simplifies customization, but can also speed up the lengthy and rigorous home building permit process.

You can find an overview of companies involved in 3D printing of homes here. We’ve summarized the myths about building a home with 3D printing here.