An Interface for Assisting the Design and Production of Pop-Up Card

This paper describes an interface for assisting the design and production of pop-Up cards by using a computer. A pop-up card is a piece of a folded paper from which a three-dimensional structure pops up when it is opened and can be folded flatly again. People enjoy its interesting mechanism in pop-up books and greeting cards. However, it is difficult for non-professional people to design pop-up cards because of various geometric constraints to fold flatwise. We therefore propose an interface to help people to design and make pop-up cards easily. We deal with pop-up cards that fully opens at 180-degrees in this paper.

We implement a prototype that allows the user to design a pop-up card by setting new parts on the fold lines and editing their position and shape afterwards. At the same time, the system examines whether the parts protrude from the card or whether the parts collide with each other when the card is closed. The result is continuously shown to the user as a feedback. This enables the user to concentrate on the design activity.

We created a couple of pop-up cards using our system and performed an informal preliminary user study to demonstrate the usability of our system.