Move over Ikea: Space-saving foldable furniture may be just a mouse click away

Here comes a space saving tip for urban dwellers. A joint research team from Canada and China has developed the first automatic algorithm to help tell whether a piece of furniture could be foldable, and how.

The algorithm could help furniture designers or even ordinary people to come up with space saving furniture designs quickly and easily.

Give a computer a 3D model of a piece of furniture and tell it which direction you want it to fold, and the algorithm would then produce a collapsible design at minimum cost and without the need for major modifications.

The algorithm can be used with a 3D printer. The researchers printed a dining table, a work desk and a bed in parts and assembled them with hinges, and they found the computer-generated designs achieved space saving ratios of up to 88.9 per cent.

The project was led by Li Honghua at the Simon Fraser University in Canada (SFU) and the National University of Defense Technology in China and Hu Ruizhen with SFU, Zhejiang University and Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was detailed in a paper, Foldabilizing Furniture, which has been accepted by the SIGGRAPH, a top annual conference of computer graphics experts to be held in Los Angeles in August.