Collapsible Worlds

Jyh-Ming Lien

For his work, Lien was awarded the 2015 Mason Emerging Researcher/Scholar/ Creator Award. The award recognizes the very best of Mason’s younger scholars.

Jyh-Ming Lien is with the Department of Computer Science and, more specifcally, the Motion and Shape Computing Group in the Autonomous Robotics Laboratory.

He creates elegant, hypnotizing, and complex 3-D computer models that seem to fold and unfold efortlessly.

“Like the rest of the human race, I like to make and appreciate visually appealing objects,” Lien says. “I simply followed my instinct. If I was not in computational science working on topics related to shape and motion, I would have been in architecture design.”

His recent work provides the underpinnings of a more compact daily life, from collapsible cups to folding furniture. Practical results of 3-D modeling include cars designed to collapse to protect passengers during collisions, bicycles that compactly fold for transport, surgical instruments entering the body in a compact size to minimize the surgical site opening, and satellite antenna umbrellas going into space tiny, but expanding to full size in orbit.

A version of this article by Michele McDonald originally appeared on Mason’s new website.

Computational Origami Image from the Motion and Shape Computing Group (MASC), courtesy of Jyn-Ming Lien and computer science PhD candidate Zhonghua XI. MASC’s goal is to develop effcient, robust, and practical algorithms for representing, manipulating, and analyzing massive geometric data of shape and motion.