Oliver van Kaick, School of Computer Science
Computer tools for modeling 3D shapes have become quite advanced. These tools are used for the development of computer games, special effects in movies, and even for the design of everyday objects such as chairs, tables and vases. However, in the context of design, much of the modeling work is still done manually by a user or artist, while the computer tool mainly ensures that the designed shapes can be appropriately drawn on the screen and fabricated in the real world. One interesting question is whether we can go one step further and let computers automatically model designs of everyday objects, especially designs that require a certain level of creative thinking. In this talk, I would like to explore this question and present a few research works that take a step in this direction. The main idea of these works is to provide inspiration to the artists by automatically creating interesting variations of shape designs with computers; the artists can then take the computer-generated designs and refine them into final products. In more detail, I will talk about how to generate shape variations by recombining existing shapes in novel ways, and how to ensure that the synthesized shapes still function appropriately, that is, verify that they serve their intended purpose.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016 in Science Cafe
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