Here we proposed an assistant interface to help people to design and create popup cards

Here we proposed an assistant interface to help people to design and create popup cards. Our system examines whether the parts protrude from the card or whether they collide with one another during interactive editing, and it displays the result continuously to the user as feedback. This helps the user concentrate on the design activity. We showed sample pop-up cards created using our system and reported the results of a preliminary user study. The preliminary user study shows that the protrusion and collision detection functions are very effective.
We plan to add new functions to the system in the future. First, we would like to make a mirror editing system in which the system changes values to maintain symmetry if the user edits a part. Second, we would like to create a function that the user could use to change lengths and angles by entering numerical values. Third, we would like to make a constraint mechanism so that when the user marks a pair of edges, those two edges are always the same length.

Whereas we use textures to add appearance details to a part, preparing the texture in advance using other software is inconvenient. We would like to let the user paint textures directly on a part using our system. Although we have implemented five mechanisms in this system, there are many other possibilities. One of the most interesting mechanisms we plan to implement is curved surfaces. Curved surfaces deform non-linearly unlike a simple planar surfaces and we plan to apply some soft of physical simulation. We would not claim that our method (direct manipulation interface with continuous feedback) is the best interface for designing physical objects in gen- eral. There are many other methods for designing physical objects such as quick sketching or tangible interfaces. Each method has its own strength and weakness. Our experience is that sketching and tangible approaches are less constraining, so they are good for very early exploration. In contrast, our method is suitable for later stages of design process or for the design of objects with complicated constraits. Pop-up card is an example of highly-constrained objects where one can not design arbitrary shape and our approach works well. However, it is true that our method is a little bit too constraining for very initial exploration and we would like to work on this problem in the future. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Jun Mitani for his helpful comments. We also appreciate the members of Igarashi Laboratory for their useful discussions.