Acoustic Reliefs
Acoustic diffusers that scatter sound evenly and can also carry an image. Two were fabricated at room scale.
Advancing the future of computational design.
A research lab led by Prof. Bernd Bickel.
We develop algorithms for design problems that end in a physical object: shells, panels, moulds and materials.
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Interactive Design
Tools that let designers explore shape and performance together, in real time.
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Geometry Processing
Fast, robust methods for representing, optimising and reconstructing shape.
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Computational Fabrication
Designing materials and structures so they behave as intended once built.
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Creative AI
Learning-based methods that generate, simulate and invert design problems.
Prototypes and installations
Designing with Tension: Nearly-Developable Patch Layouts
Free-form surfaces approximated by a few nearly developable patches that become a tensile structure when anchored, validated on fabricated prototypes.
FlexMaps Pavilion: a twisted arc made of mesostructured flat flexible panels
Flat panels whose elastic properties are designed so that, bent and assembled, they settle into the intended curved shape.
Inverse Design of Discrete Interlocking Materials with Desired Mechanical Behavior
Kinematic materials whose deformation limits are designed element by element, then validated on fabricated prototypes.
All publicationsPublications
Highlights
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Efficient Nano‑Optical Eye Tracking for Smart Glasses
Jipeng Sun, Lekang Yuan, Ruslan Guseinov, Bernd Bickel, Thabo Beeler, Thomas Auzinger, Felix Heide
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Inverse Rendering for Modeling with Line Primitives
Kenji Tojo, Ariel Shamir, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel
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Pretrained Video Models as Differentiable Physics Simulators for Urban Wind Flows
Janne Perini*, Rafael Bischof*, Moab Arar, Ayça Duran, Michael A. Kraus, Siddhartha Mishra, Bernd Bickel
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DiffSoup: Direct Differentiable Rasterization of Triangle Soup for Extreme Radiance Field Simplification
Kenji Tojo, Bernd Bickel, Nobuyuki Umetani
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Hierarchical Optimization of the As-Rigid-As-Possible Energy
Hendrik Meyer, Bernd Bickel, Marc Alexa
Our team
Computer scientists, architects and engineers.
Prof. Bernd Bickel
Dr. Bharath Seshadri
Dr. Pengbin Tang
Dr. Kenji Tojo
Dr. Sophia Kuhn
Anna Maria Eggler
Zhenyuan (Desmond) Liu
Jeremy Chew
Rafael Bischof
Yuhan Zhang
Yixin Zeng
Haoyang Zhou
Stefania Rasile
Malina Strugaru
Dominik Stoll
Fábio Porfírio da Costa
Dr. Michal Piovarči · Dr. Eleftherios Triantafyllidis · Manas Bhargava
Write your thesis with us.
We take Bachelor and Master thesis students interested in computational design, visual computing, interactive geometry processing, spatial computing, creative AI, computational fabrication and reinforcement learning.
Rafael Bischof
Email rabischof@ethz.chPhD and postdoc openings are announced here when available.
Available thesis topics · Bachelor & Master
- Inverse Generative Design of Microstructures for Additive Manufacturing
- Mechanics-Aware Deformation of Large-scale Discrete Interlocking Materials
- Solving Thermal Physics with Gaussian Splats
- Make Your Own Dice: Geometry Equilibrium Design with Spatially Varying Density Control
- Simulation and Computational Design of Chocolate Egg Dispensers
- Simulation of Material Extrusion for Inter-layer Bonding and Residue Stress Modeling