Equipping form with function

Common toys such as steerable cars or waving wind-up figures are available as 3D-printable models, which also contain their mechanical components. However, these mechanical structures are optimized to fit exactly one particular shape of the toy. If designers want to reuse such a mechanism with different shapes, the necessary manual adjustments to the individual components are often unmanageable for non-experts, in addition to being extremely tedious. Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) in collaboration with colleagues from Adobe Research have now solved this problem by developing an interactive design tool that allows users to easily adjust a mechanical template to the shape of their choice. The software tool, which will be made available in the future, will be presented at this year’s prestigious “SIGGRAPH” conference by first author and PhD student Ran Zhang from the research group of Bernd Bickel.