An Interactive System to Support the Exploration and Measurement of Adaptive 3D Designs

Thingiverse is one of the most popular 3D model repositories. As of October 2020, it hosted over 1.9 million 3D designs that are designed by semi-experts and enthusiasts and are shared across the fabrication community. Many of these designs are designed to interact with real-world objects and are customizable upon personal needs. However, it is challenging for novice users to discover such designs using textual information, comprehend what parameters mean to adjust for customization, where the measurement targets locate on target objects, and how to measure them correctly. These challenges may cause the design to be incorrectly adjusted and cannot function as expected, resulting in a failed print and thus requires the users to start over, which costs additional time and materials. To solve these problems, this work presents an interactive system that uses a graph-based structure to represent adaptive designs to improve the search and exploration, and then guides end-users through the measurement process using a set of modular measurement methods for primitive shapes. The proposed system assists users without expert skills to conveniently discover, adjust, and reuse adaptive designs that are shared online, which allows novice users to effectively and efficiently print adaptive designs. Eventually, the system can be generalized to other repositories, such as industrial parts repositories and medical model repositories, to provide an effective structure and interface for design discovery and adjustment