Absolutely lovely. I started folding when I was seven years old and the birdbase - the basis of the flapping bird and thousands of other models - eluded me for weeks because I couldn't fill the gaps between the two diagrams I had in front. Seeing it happen like this would have instantly unlocked that. Of course, it would have ruined the sense of satisfaction too, but hey. Cracking work.
Some linguistic trivia: the word origami is a Japanese compound of "fold" (折り - ori) and "paper" (紙 - kami), literally translating to "fold paper" (折り紙 - origami).
The parent comment pas paper as 'kami', yet the 'k' morphs into a 'g' in the final word. Is this common in Japanese? I've not seen it much outside of Welsh, my own mother tongue.
Is it just me or is it not animating correctly? It loads and I can pan/zoom around the sheet with the crease lines, but it doesn't actually animate the folds. I tried dragging the slider like the instructions say as well as trying interactive mode, but it doesn't do anything.
Still, I can guess what it is supposed to do and this is really neat.
dragging the slider all the way to the left takes you to -100% (which doesn't make a lot of sense because it looks complete, just inverted).
Find 0% on the slider and do the manipulation from there
I toggled the Allow User Interaction button and was able to click and drag a corner of the paper around, which was pretty neat.
But I found myself wanting to multi-touch the screen, to hold one edge while moving another. I felt as though the mouse/touchpad interactions we have available are far less expressive than holding and manipulating the paper with our bare hands.
I have always seen origami as childsplay to learn spatial understanding. It turns our that folding science is applicable in many fields! Proteins, buildings, airplanes and many more objects found in nature and human designs apply origami in surprising ways. The most interesting one I found was flowers; how they fold out when starting to blossom.
Space too, NASA turned to origami to design folding panels for radiators on space ships. Makes sense if you think about it, they need to compact a large sheet into as little space as possible and in a way that it can be unfurled smoothly.
This is brilliant. Absolutely. Already sent on to my origami mad sister. The only thing I wish it did was tell you what example file you loaded, if you are forgetful and have to go hunting around for it again just because you forgot the name then that makes it harder to recommend what model example to open first.
Last time I made some origami was actually for a card for my Japanese neighbour, for this I used paper with a design on and made regular cranes. This project could be monetizable if you could buy paper designs and see how said paper would work in the finished model. Plus what happens if you rotate the design or flip it over? This would be nice to preview so less prototypes have to be physically folded.
Although my origami efforts were received gratefully, I did wonder afterwards whether this was some type of cultural appropriation going on, would I give a French person homemade smelly cheese?
Nice! We've been demoing this one at YC dinners a lot. People always enjoy this one. Always funny to see people's reactions when their origami floats away, and we need to teach them how to reset it.
If you want to try it in VR, we are featuring it in Supermedium, a full VR browser, which makes Origami Simulator easy to access (click a link in VR). It's been one of the more popular VR sites to visit!
Thanks. I did old-school origami (step by step guides) back in high school and have been meaning to learn how the newer "crease pattern" based stuff works. This looks like it'd be a useful tool in that pursuit.
I find immense pleasure in looking at 3d-structures like this. Sometimes I just close my eyes and try to visualize these, the task seems to be so complex for my brain that it really shuts off every other thought I have.
Intersection of arts and physics is inspiring. Origami has been applied in various research ranging from nanobots to the shapes of the solar panels in space.
There are definitely algorithms for UV unwrapping of polygonal models onto texture maps, under various constraints. I'm sure you could persuade one of those to generate you a net from a 3D model.
