Voronoi Tiling, Digital Fabric Printing and Interactive eGarments - Designing the iBody

Traditionally, fabric prints were designed using a regular tiling pattern in a design step completely separate from garment pattern design and garment construction. With the emergence and ongoing spread of digital fabric printers, these different design steps may now be combined so that fabric prints can be designed as a function of how they will appear on the final garment, and then the stages of construction decomposed to obtain the desired result. For repetitive prints, however, whether of a regular or irregular nature, there is a need to be able to dynamically modify the organisation of the tiling to ensure the most effective tile placement in the end result. In addition, this tiling must ideally be sensitive to the draping properties of the human body as well as the location of various tiles with respect to different body parts, even in a static printing solution. The use of dynamically modifiable tiling structures can facilitate this process. We explore the adaptation and use of Voronoi tilings to this problem, including the use of digital surface draping of dynamic Voronoi tiles onto a human body simulcrum. Furthermore, through the use of Augmented Reality, we propose to exploit the power of the dynamic Voronoi diagram to create changing print patterns that adjust to the movement of the body.