New Pop Art

For this project we created a design system for the development of pop ups. This system leverages human intuition with physical objects and the power of computer simulation.

One of our main goals was to create a flexible system that would allow for future development and fast iteration. We picked the tools we would use for this project with flexibility in mind. At the core of our system we use a custom paper folding simulation built in Rhino/Grasshopper. The Grasshopper environment allows for simple input and output to and from the digital world.

Our first step was to research pop up books, mechanisms, origami, and other methods related to paper manipulation. We decided to focus on mechanisms that use only one piece of paper and use cuts in that paper to create pop ups. We made this choice because although the mechanisms are relatively simple, the possibility space is vast.  Although there are many types of pop ups, we chose to work with just one, the simple V Fold.

Once we were comfortable with our choice and after doing research in to the mathematics and geometry of the one sheet one cut pop up, we wanted to simulate it in the computer.

As a quick proof of concept we prototyped a single pop up using Solidworks. The geometric solver in Solidworks made it really easy to simulate the pop up mechanism. However, Solidworks is not friendly for integration with augmented work spaces. Rhino/Grasshopper was able to meet these needs. Rhino/Grasshopper does not have a geometric solver thus we had to create our own. Our first attempt was to implement an evolutionary solver. Although this did work, it was slow and more complex then it needed to be. We replaced the evolutionary solver with a geometric solver. This geometric solver runs in real time, and is easier to work with.

Once our simulation worked we needed to create a system for the user to interact with the computer simulation. We mounted a webcam over head that could track a reacTIVision marker. This becomes a cursor that exists in both the digital and physical worlds.

In future iterations of this project we hope to explore more complex types of pop ups as well as arrays of pop ups. We also look forward to creating pop ups out of many new materials at new scales.

Link to our grasshopper file. https://drive.google.com/a/andrew.cmu.edu/file/d/0B5Ag8l5inECERmVId1NkemU0R00/view?usp=sharing