Acoustic Reliefs
Diffusers that scatter sound evenly and can also carry an image. Two were built at room scale.
Advancing the future of computational design.
The Computational Design Laboratory at ETH Zurich pioneers algorithms and solutions for interactive design, geometry processing, and computational fabrication.
Advancing the future of computational design.
The Computational Design Laboratory at ETH Zurich pioneers algorithms and solutions for interactive design, geometry processing, and computational fabrication.
Computational design and visual computing
Led by Prof. Bernd Bickel, we develop algorithms and practical solutions for interactive design, geometry processing, spatial computing, creative AI and computational fabrication.
Our research is rooted in computer science, and much of it ends in something you can hold: a panel, a mould, a pavilion.
Our research
Six areas, one lab
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Computational 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.
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Visual computing
Rendering, appearance and reconstruction: how shape and material look, and how to recover them from images.
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Spatial computing
Mixed-reality tools that bring design data into the room where it is reviewed and built.
From algorithm to object
Each of these started as a paper and was tested as a physical prototype.
Designing with Tension: Nearly-Developable Patch Layouts
Free-form surfaces split into a few nearly flat patches that become a tensile structure once anchored.
Metamolds: Computational Design of Silicone Molds
CoreCavity: Shell Decomposition for Two-Piece Rigid Molds
Inverse Design of Discrete Interlocking Materials
Publications
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Generative Whimsy Jigsaws
Jeremy Chew, Kenji Tojo, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel
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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
Study and write your thesis with us
We supervise Bachelor and Master theses in computational design, visual computing, interactive geometry processing, spatial computing, creative AI, computational fabrication and reinforcement learning.
Rafael Bischof
Email rabischof@ethz.chAvailable 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