One of the oldest, most versatile and inexpensive of materials — paper — seemingly springs to life, bending, folding, or flattening itself, by means of a low-cost actuation technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. A thin layer of conducting thermoplastic, applied to common paper with an inexpensive 3D printer or even painted…

Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists have developed a system that can translate a wide variety of 3-D shapes into stitch-by-stitch instructions that enable a computer-controlled knitting machine to automatically produce those shapes. Researchers in the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab have used the system to produce a variety of plush toys and garments. What’s more, James…