HyperGami

About the software


HyperGami is a design environment for paper sculpture built upon the MacScheme system (LightShip Software). The user chooses from a number of starting polyhedra (we've shown one of several available palettes; center right). The selected polyhedron appears in the ThreeD window (bottom right) and a corresponding "folding net" appears in the TwoD window (bottom left). The user can employ both built-in features and the embedded programming language to customize the polyhedron. For example, he may (among other operations) stretch or shrink the polyhedron along its axes, truncate it at vertices, or add pyramidal caps to faces. Once the user is done customizing his new shape, the system will attempt to generate a folding net for it. The user may then work with a variety of paint tools to decorate the folding net; finally, he can print out the decorated net on a color printer, and assemble it into a paper model.


About the creators

The husband and wife team of Mike Eisenberg and Ann (Nishioka) Eisenberg creates, maintains, and distributes HyperGami. They are in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They build HyperGami creatures (in paper, plaster, wax, chocolate, and fabric) in any spare time they have. As a result, their offices have become something of a (notorious) landmark in the engineering building. Their other hobbies include puppetry, humor, and sushi. 

How to obtain a copy of HyperGami

HyperGami is available free of charge. It runs on any color Macintosh with at least 12 MB of free ram. Please be warned that HyperGami is research software only. Use of HyperGami or any products created with HyperGami for commerical purposes is strictly prohibited.

We ask that you register with us before downloading HyperGami so that we have an idea of who is using the software. Just send email to the address below with your name, email address, snailmail address (optional, but we would like to know what country/part of the US you are from), and occupation (also optional, but we are especially interested in corresponding with mathematics educators, scientists, and artists).

Send email to eisenbea@cs.colorado.edu to become a registered user of HyperGami and for directions to our restricted download area.

Mike Eisenberg is supported in part by NSF grants RED-9253425 and a Young Investigator award IRI-9258684. Ann Eisenberg is supported by a fellowship from the National Physical Science Consortium. HyperGami is also supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Cooperative Agreement No. CDA-940860. We would also like to thank Apple Computer, Inc. for donating the machines with which this research was conducted.