The Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany has developed this thing, the function of which will take many words to describe but will become immediately apparent once you watch the video. Here are the words Boing Boing uses:
The Protopiper ... is a modified tape-gun that extrudes regular, precise lengths of hollow tubing made from packing tape, with which you can prototype room-sized objects at full size to get a sense of the masses and scales involved.
That's much better than what we would have come up, which would have been something along the lines of: "It's like a gun that shoots...straws...but it doesn't really shoot them, and some of them are sticky, and the idea is to build real life pieces of contemporary furniture inspired by Tron." So, good thing that video exists.
· Protopiper: tape-gun-based 3D printer extrudes full-size furniture prototypes [Boing Boing]