3D printers have been around since the 1980s, but we are still far from maximizing their potential. One active area of research and development is “self-actuating” objects: flat materials that transform themselves through material forces into the desired 3D object. Previously, however, the range of objects was limited to those with sharp edges and little, if any, curvature, and the transformation methods were based primarily on folding or processes that could not be controlled very precisely (e.g. chemical reactions or inflation). Now, for the first time, a group of current and former IST Austria computer scientists have made it possible to create self-actuating, smooth, free-form objects. In so doing, they developed both an ingenious material design and a new method of self-transformation—they call the fruits of their innovation “CurveUps”. Moreover, the team, which consists of Ruslan Guseinov, Eder Miguel, and Bernd Bickel, developed the computational tools to take a user-provided 3D model and automatically create a 2D flattened template that, upon release, transforms into the original 3D version.