I was listening to my nightly podcast and normally the voice of a comp geek always puts me in a deep sleep - but not this time. It was Robert Lang talking about his crazy computational oragami. I usually just think of oragami as arts & crafts - and that crane always comes to mind. But apparantley there is a whole math/science devoted to this stuff. If you recall oragami is when you make a figure out of 1 piece of paper, folding only and no tearing.
Computational oragami is the use of mathematics and algorithms to solve "oragami problems" - or how to fold a super duper complex animal - like a fish with thousands of scales. So the math formula are the "ground" rules for oragami. Lang was saying that some of the complex figures take about 8 hours - geesh thats a lot of folding. He even has developped some mathematics software called "Oragami Simulation" and "Treemaker" that sort of maps the folding pattern onto the peice of paper so you can make these crazy things. I was checking out some of the math and it seems super duper geometry heavy and the patterns for folding are crazy!
here is the image that gives you scorpion:
Plus this oragami even has sort of an engineering application - for instance Nasa used oragami technology to fold some crazy huge lens in space (because they wanted to look in numerous directions through the same lens).
Anywho I was up all night folding and this is what I came up with:
for more info check out Lang's Orgami Site
