Design of Pop-Up Cards Based on Weighted Straight Skeletons

Abstract

We investigated the use of weighted straight skeletons in the computer-aided creation of pop-up cards. A pop-up card is a sheet of paper that can be folded to a flat plane but, when opened, produces a meaningful three-dimensional structure. Weighted straight skeletons are a special type of Voronoi diagrams, and they are closely related to the foldability of a sheet of paper along specified lines. We characterize the weights that make a paper foldable and apply them to an interactive system for the design of pop-up cards.