: A Designing Editor for Line Stone Decoration
Yuki Igarashi∗
University of Tsukuba, Japan / JSPS Research Fellow         ! "        Figure 1: Overview of our system. A user draws free-form strokes on the canvas. The system automatically generates a virtual line stone
image. The user constructs a physical pattern, using a cutting plotter. Finally, the user employs the pattern to place the stones.

1Introduction

Line stone decoration is popular with young people. They enjoy applying line stone decorations to personal goods, such as notebookPCs, mobile phones and digital cameras. However, novices often
find line stone decorations difficult to design, as the user must consider stroke length, stone width, and stone spacing. Hence, manypeople employ off-the-shelf design sheets or have their items decorated by an in-store professional. We have developed an interactive designing editor for line stone decoration. The user interactively draws freeform strokes on the canvas, as shown in Figure 1.
The system then automatically generates a virtual line stone image(Fig. 1(b)), in which none of the stones overlap. Various off-line
methods have been proposed for designing such decorations (e.g.,tile mosaics [Hausner 2001]). Using our system, the user can create
the designs interactively at the computer. Our system also createsa physical pattern to help novice users to construct real line stone(Fig. 1 (c), (d)).

2(a) The user can pull an existing stroke.

User Interface

Figure 2 shows our prototype system. The system is implemented
as a JavaTM program with internal vector representations. Whenthe user draws a stroke, the system automatically places stones on
the stroke without overlap. Strokes are represented as polylines,
so that the user can easily modify a stroke to move, erase, change
the colors of the stones, or change the scale. Existing strokes are
modified using a pull tool [Igarashi et al. 2005], as shown in Figure3(a). During a pull operation, the system interactively updates thepositions of the stones and the number of stones on a stroke. The
user can load a preexisting image and place stones to create a designin the shape of the image (Fig. 3(b)). Flood-fill operations are alsoavailable.
Once the design has been completed, the system supports the production process. The user is shown the required number of stones
and the total production time, and the resulting line stone image isexported in vector format (Figure 1(c)). The DXF dataset is supported. The user can then cut out a pattern using a cutter plotter[Graphtec ]. The holes in this pattern facilitate the placement of theline stones on the design, as shown in Figure 1(d). In this way, evena novice user can easily create real line stones.

3

Figure 2: Screenshot of the DECO system.

Results

We used our system to create some line stone designs and actual linestone decorations, as shown in Figure 4. A design session typically∗ e-mail:yukim@acm.org(b) The user loads an image and places stones to trace the image.
Figure 3: Operations.

took 10-20 min, and production of the decoration required 30-60min.

Figure 4: Results using our system and real line stones.

References
G RAPHTEC. Craft ROBO.
H AUSNER , A. 2001. Simulatiing decorative mosaics. In Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics andinteractive techniques, 573–580.
I GARASHI , T., M OSCOVICH , T., AND H UGHES , J. F. 2005.
As-rigid-as-possible shape manipulation. ACM Transactions on
Computer Graphics 24, 3, 1134–1141.