Paper and Plotter: A 3D Surface

Paul Haeberli

1977

This was one of my first projects in computer graphics.

While an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I found a Hewlett-Packard desktop calculator with a small pen plotter in the math library. I spent many hours programming it to draw slices of a function f(x,y) on 3"x5" cards. Then I carefully cut out the shape of each slice with scissors to form this 3D sculpture.

One nice thing about this is it can be folded flat.

More recently, I've developed software to drive a laser cutter to make a similar model.