Ted Howard

I’ve been toying around with what I’ll call ‘origami unfolding’ for awhile. Traditional origami uses a printed piece of paper, often a busy and elaborate design based on my limited experience. When you fold it, you end up with pieces of the design inevitably not matching the pieces next to it. What if you could print a design that, when folded, would match up?

The idea is relatively simple. Mark up a piece of paper such that you can uniquely identify parts of the paper, both location and orientation, when it has been folded. I can certainly visualize ways to automatically do this with complicated patterns and cameras. I don’t believe in automating things until you’ve done it manually a few times. Besides that, I don’t have the time, resources, or desire to automate it.

You can try it yourself. The project page has a link to the program and instructions.

I folder a piece of paper, marked the parts I could see by outlining regions along folds and marking regions with letters. I unfolded it and looked at the regions’ outlines, letters, and orientations. I then wrote a computer program that takes images and creates a new image that when folded produces the desired post-fold origami surface image. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Here’s a couple diagrams of the regions before and after folding.

Here are some photos of some pieces of paper I used to develop the method.

Similarly for a triangle box. Unlike the balloon, this one has small visible regions on both sides of the paper.