Perception-aware Optimizations for Appearance and Tactile Fabrication

In the last decades, we have seen tremendous advances in additive manufacturing. Now, the results of this development become available to a wide range of users and empower them to create and customize their designs. The unique advantage of this technology is the complexity of the objects that it can create. By depositing different materials with extremely high precision, current 3D printers can create objects with unseen geometrical details and mechanical properties. The freedom in creating and customizing previously impossible to fabricate objects makes the additive manufacturing a key enabler for many applications such as prototyping, bio-fabrication, education, and visualization. Unfortunately, traditional design tools cannot handle the complexity offered by this technology. To address this problem, new computational fabrication algorithms try to optimize the material distribution within the 3D printing volume such that the fabricated objects resemble the design goals, for example, appearance or mechanical properties. To fully utilize additive manufacturing, it becomes critical for these techniques to rely on optimal parametrizations as well as efficient and accurate optimization techniques.