For more than 500 years, origami artists have designed mythical and real animal sculptures from a simple sheet of paper. This Japanese craft has long been valued for its versatile properties of creating fairly complex shapes from a few delicate folds on both sides.
An interest in applying these folding models to real-world applications began to emerge in the sixties when the origami principle became useful in understanding how materials can be folded into very compact shapes, which can then be unfolded to deploy larger and more complex devices.
It is only when engineering comes into play and paper is replaced by new materials that these folding principles acquire an unlimited potential...a flat 2D becomes a fold and bends into a 3D!