OmniSoft: A Design Tool for Soft Objects by Example

Abstract

Softness is one of the most important factors in human tactile perception. With recent advances in 3Dprinting, there has been significant progress in fabricating compliant objects. However, existing methods typically remain inaccessible to end-users, mainly due to the separation between designing shapes and setting printing parameters to achieve desired softness, resulting in the exclusion of its customization in early design processes. In this work, we contribute an end-to-end design tool that takes a design-by-example approach: given a 3D model, a user can specify the region of interest and a level of softness, by shopping everyday objects as a reference. The tool then generates both geometry and 3D printing parameters to reproduce the desired softness, which can be fabricated using low-cost FDM 3D printing and materials for it. We also provide a data-driven pipeline to enable other compliance modeling methods to be generalized within our design tool. In two user studies, we demonstrated that users could easily locate existing reference objects' softness to a 3D printed object. In a design session, end-users successfully used OmniSoft to design augmented functions.