Creating interactive papercrafts often involves the processes of craft making (e.g., folding, cutting, gluing, etc.) and fabricating the embedded functional circuitry. These two processes are usually separated in the current practice, making the workflow laborious and affecting the in-paper circuit stability. To address the issue of the separated crafting and circuiting processes, we present LiqMetCraft, a toolkit for creating electronics-embedded papercrafts through an integrated process. The toolkit allows users to construct the craft structure by folding and cutting, and forms the circuit traces simultaneously. This is achieved with liquid-metal-dyed paper-like fabric which partially becomes conductive due to the cutting/folding-induced pressure while the unpressed parts of the paper remain insulated. The toolkit consists of software interfaces for papercraft design and hardware components, mainly the liquid-metal-dyed paper-like fabrics and other off-the-shelf components, for physical prototyping. The user studies shows that the participants quickly learned the toolkit and found the integrated process of circuit assembly and shape formation to be engaging and inspiring.

Authors: Qi Zhang, Shuwen Jiang, Zeshui Li, and Kening Zhu