Upcoming Event: CSEM Student Forum

Computational Paper and Pop-ups! A Virtual Design Assistant for Paper Engineers.

Nina De La Torre,

Abstract

Pop-up cards are a type of dynamic paper craft: opening the card deploys a 3D structure, and closing the card collapses that structure back into 2D. Unlike Origami folded from a single piece of paper, pop-up cards are assembled by gluing several paper mechanisms to each other. To design a pop-up card, paper engineers follow a repetitive process of folding, cutting, and gluing physical sheets of paper and testing if their design works.

Although several virtual pop-up design assistants have been proposed in the literature, these previous methods restrict users to a limited set of predefined paper mechanisms. In this talk, I will present a method for designing and visualizing the actuation of pop-up cards in real time, capable of modeling a broad set of general mechanisms. This method encodes the pop-up card as a flat 2D template specifying where to cut, fold, and glue the paper together, and extends Ghassaei et al.’s mass-spring Origami Simulator to visualize the card’s deployment into 3D.

Biography

Nina is in her fourth year at the CSEM PhD program in the Oden Institute. She is advised by Etienne Vouga and Rachel Ward, and her research focuses on using computational Origami to study pop-up cards!