Designing Decorative Joinery for Furniture | Two Minute Papers #157

Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. This paper is about designing and creating furniture with pieces that are geometrically interlocked. Such pieces not only have artistic value, but such structures can also enhance the integrity and sturdiness of a piece of furniture. This piece of work takes a simple 2D drawing of this interlocking structure and assembles the required pieces for us to build a 3D model from them. This drawing can be done with one of the most user friendly modeler program out there, Google SketchUp. This can be used even by novices. From these disassembled parts, it is highly non-trivial to create a 3D printable model. For instance, it is required that these pieces can be put together with one translational motion. Basically, all we need is one nudge to put two of these pieces together. If you ever had a new really simple piece of furniture from Ikea, had a look at the final product at the shop, and thought, "well, I only have 10 minutes to put this thing together, but anyway, how hard can it be"? And you know, 3 hours of cursing later, the damn thing is still not completely assembled. If you had any of those experiences before, this one push assembly condition is for you. And the algorithm automatically finds a sequence of motions that assembles our target 3D shape, and because we only have 2D information from the input, it also has to decide how and where to extrude, thicken, or subtract from these volumes. The search space of possible motions is immense, and we have to take into consideration that we don't even know if there is a possible solution for this puzzle at all! If this the case, the algorithm finds out and proposes changes to the model that make the construction feasible. And if this wasn't enough, we can also put this digital furniture model into a virtual world where gravitational forces are simulated to see how stable the final result is. Here, the proposed yellow regions indicate that the stability of this table could be improved via small modifications. It is remarkable to see that a novice user who has never done a minute of 3D modeling can create such a beautiful and resilient piece of furniture. Really, really nice work. Loving it. Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!