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A new process of 3D printing alters the classics such as Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci into a tactile artwork that will help the blind people 'see' and feel these masterpieces through the power of their touch. John Olson, developer of the technique, has always wanted to explore the image spectrum. This is when he started to transform some of the most famous pieces of art into tactile images so that the blind people too can experience these classic forms of art. "As a young man I decided I wanted to be a photojournalist," Olson explains. "Later on in my career I began to realize how important images had been to me. And I started to wonder what my life would have been like without them. And that prompted me to wonder, what's it like for the blind. So that motivated me to develop a printing process that blind people could see," as reported by International Business Times

"It's a three step process, in which we in step one take any conventional two dimensional image and convert it to 3D data," Olson continues. "Once that data has been converted, we send it to a machine that sculpts the data out of a block of substrate. It gives that image length, width, depth and texture. And once that's been sculpted it goes through a printing process where we lay the image back down on top of the relief in perfect registration. So what you end up with is a three-dimensional print that has length, width, depth and texture," says International Business Times

John Olson was a former photographer at LIFE magazine and co-founded a company, 3D Photoworks, that developed their own printing procedure for fine pieces of art, as reported by Gulf Digital News.