Interactive pop-up card design. 1

Pop-up cards are fun to make and receive, and it´s a pleasure to watch 3D shapes appear out of nowhere, jump up off the page, and reach for the sky. And as an output medium for 3D computer graphics, they´re a perfect match; you get real 3D effects like perspective and parallax, and you don´t even need special glasses or other hardware. I talk about the issues involved in designing and writing a pop-up design assistant. My goal in creating my assistant wasn´t to create pop-up cards for viewing on the computer. The idea is to make it easier to design wonderful cards, which we can then construct and share in the real world. I talk about how pop-up cards work. I also cover some of the basic geometry behind the most fundamental form of pop up. This sets the stage for writing the program, which I discuss in part 2