Abstract:
As a traditional art of folding paper, origami has been practiced over hundreds of years in Japan. Its fineness and amusement are acknowledged by not only Japanese but also entire world. Many origami models are announced by creative origami writers as origami drill books now. However, it is somewhat difficult to understand origami books for some people, especially for children, because in the origami books a folding process for an origami model is usually explained by a sequence of illustrations that cannot show all the portions of the model. To deal with this problem, it is desirable to represent how an origami model is folded and how the situation of the model changes in three-dimensional virtual space.
We describe a framework to recognizing and recreating folding process of origami based on illustrations of origami drill books (instructions). Illustration images acquired from instructions are motley and not sequenced. Moreover, the information obtained from 2D illustrations is so superficial and incomplete that the folding operations cannot be determined uniquely. To solve these problems, a highly flexible and reliable recognition mechanism is proposed. The outline of the methods which enable feasible folding operations to be generated based only on superficial and incomplete information extracted from illustrations is described. Several examples that prove the validness of proposed algorithms/methods are also given.
Additionally, an approach to constructing 3-D paper-made objects by using skeletons obtained from 2-D images such as handwriting sketches is proposed. Most of creative origami models have been designed within only the last several decades. The main reason can be traced to the development of geometric and other mathematical techniques in the 1980s, which has enabled the basic form of an origami model to be created via designing a 2-dimentional crease pattern.
Origami creation using the method of mathematical origmai design has two characteristics: (1) The models are permitted to be highly realistic and complicated, and (2) there are almost no procedures for construction of the models from their plans: corresponding crease patterns. The first characteristic is immediately connected with the difficulty and complexity to design the crease patterns. In fact, only limited specialists can design origami models using this method. Even for the specialists, the task of designing crease patterns for intended targets requires a great deal of labor. The second characteristic, on the other hand, becomes the origin of the difficulty or complexity to construct the models even crease patterns are provided. Unfortunately, to create a new work, the process of trial and error between the tasks of modifying a crease pattern and constructing the corresponding model usually needs to be repeated.
From this viewpoint, a fully-automatic method for mathematical origami design is introduced. To non-specialists, the proposed method provides the great convenience of creating intended origami models without any instructions, while to specialists, the proposed method provides the advantage of reducing most of burden occuring in design process.
About the speaker:
Hiroshi Shimanuki received the BS and ME degrees from Nagoya University in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Presently, he is a doctoral student in the Department of Systems and Social Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science at Nagoya University. Additionally, from 2004, he have been Research Assistant (RA) of the 21st Century COE (Center of Excellence) Program titled "Intelligent Media Integration for Social Information Infrastructure" proposed by Nagoya University.
