Magic Furniture: Design Paradigm of Multi-function Assembly

Assembly-based furniture with movable parts enables shape and structure reconfiguration, thus supporting multiple functions. Although a few attempts have been made for facilitating the creation of multi-function objects, designing such a multi-function assembly with the existing solutions often requires high imagination of designers. We develop the Magic Furniture system for users to easily create such designs simply given multiple cross-category objects. Our system automatically leverages the given objects as references to generate a 3D model with movable boards driven by back-and-forth movement mechanisms. By controlling the states of these mechanisms, a designed multi-function furniture object can be reconfigured to approximate the shapes and functions of the given objects. To ensure the designed furniture easy to transform between different functions, we perform an optimization algorithm to choose a proper number of movable boards and determine their shapes and sizes, following a set of design guidelines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through various multi-function furniture designed with different sets of reference inputs and various movement constraints. We also evaluate the design results through several experiments including comparative and user studies.