IT Conversations: Robert Lang – Computational Origami A 16 minute presentation by Robert Lang at OSCON 2005 on Computational Origami. Here’s some more links to go along with the podcast: Daniel Steinberg’s notes from the presentation, with links. aallan’s flickr photoset which includes many of the slides from the Computational Origami presentation. UPDATE: you can also listen to this conversation on NPR with Robert Lang. Thanks to Rozen on flickr for the link!

Origami – la galerie de Jacquet Fritz Junior Paul Jackson posted this excellent bit of news on the O-list: Hi Everyone, I heard today from Vincent Floderer that his origami artist friend and collaborator Fritz Junior Jacquet has a new website http://www.leplieur.com/ . If he is a new name to you, I highly recommend you take a look at his beautiful and imaginative work. Paul Jackson www.origami-artist.com (in the process of being updated) www.papersonics.com (new) www.foldingtogether.org (new) Here’s a link from me to the English version, on the gallery I like the most out of all of them: Origami – pliage : découvrer la galerie de Jacquet Fritz Junior en ligne – plieur de papier The image displayed is great- it’s a man opening up his chest with his hands. what a new, unique, and slightly scary way of showing all those layers normally used in human-torso-folding…

If you are into origami, then perhaps you have been to the Origami bulletin board at: www.thekhans.me.uk/phpBB2. Someone posted a question/commentary about Google Book Search on Nov 30th. This lead to a number of interesting replies, and the inevitable “being able to search through a few pages means complete theft!” reply. If people really feel that way, I understand- if you’re an author there’s no problem with you just having your book removed. But to give those responses without thinking about the actual benefits of such a system is a mistake, in my opinion. Anyway, here’s my reply, which I am posting here because I think it deserves repeating: I don’t buy into the “this promotes theft” thing at all, especially with regards to origami. Let’s face the obvious here- origami is a niche segment, which isn’t commanding high numbers for book sales. This is fine, and to be expected for anything that is farther down the long tail; I wouldn’t expect books on making wooden duck models or building model train landscapes to be …

Floor nb 3, treated unryu paper, backlit Originally uploaded by Melisande*. mélisande does some more delicious work here, in some white unryu paper. it’s a great swirly pattern with both large hexagonal and triangular geometries, as well as tons of smaller ones (including rhombic!) the tiny little line in the middle is the wire that holds things in place- she has a fantastic X-ray viewing machine, which works wonderfully (as you can see) for displaying and photographing tessellations. Time to visit the doctor, I think…

Jane’s hexagonal squashed-triangle-twist fold, close up, backlit Originally uploaded by Ori-gomi. I used Jane’s 3d star fold as the center of this, and then just fiddled with some other things around it. this piece of unryu did not have much MC on it, so the fine triangular squashes didn’t work terribly well- otherwise I probably would have made more of these nifty star collapses. I don’t think I can stress enough how much I like the design of this solution to the “how do I bring together 6 double pleats” problem; it’s elegant, clean, and efficient. total size of this paper is about 10cm x 20cm; I still think the unryu paper has promise for detailed folding, I just need to work out the kinks in the hardening process. Progress is being made, though, and that’s the important part. (description text blatantly cut-n-pasted from my flickr post.)