Zip-up Print
Publication
Takumi Yamamoto, Jiaji Li, Akib Zaman, Noah Barnes, Yuta Sugiura, Stefanie Mueller, and Koya Narumi. 2026. Zip-up Print: Rapid and Assemblable 3D printing Using 2D Flattened Zipper-like Structures. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1352, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790538
CHI 2026
Abstract
We propose a method to fabricate objects composed of 3D printed flattened pieces with integrated zipper-like structures. The object is manually assembled into a 3D shape by connecting the zipper components. By employing a zipper design that allows for angle-independent connections between patches, our method enables both the surface and zipper components to be printed in the same orientation, resulting in high-quality reconstruction of the input model with a faster 3D printing process that wastes less material. We implement a fully automated pipeline that takes a 3D model as input, converts it into developable patches, generates the zipper structures, and flattens them for subsequent 3D printing. We demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the fabrication time and support material consumption. We also present application examples that highlight the versatility of our method.