Uncrumple

Every crumple is a record of the forces that made it, and Uncrumple reads that record backwards. Thin sheets crumple everywhere it matters, from car panels, airbags and packaging to solar arrays, stent grafts and clothing. Engineering has decades of tools for predicting how a known force will deform a shape. It has almost none for the question people actually face, which runs the other way: given the crumpled result, what forces made it? Today crash investigators, failure analysts and robot designers answer that by hand, or not at all. Uncrumple answers it directly. From a crumpled sheet, it recovers where each push landed, in which direction, how hard and for how long, then computes the reversal that would undo the damage. On held-out sheets it places each push to within 1 cm and 4 degrees, compared with 14 cm and 94 degrees for guessing. Built on Meta’s SAM 3.1, VGGT and Muse Spark, Uncrumple also works from just two photographs, locating pushes to about 7 cm with no measuring equipment. Anyone can try it live at https://uncrumple-demo.vercel.app. Reading forces from shape opens real applications. Laundry robots could know how to flatten a garment. Production lines could catch and reverse deformation from a single camera. Crash and damage analysis could become a measurement instead of a judgment call. We solved the fundamental case first because the method is material-agnostic: it carries to metal, tissue and any structure whose loads must be read from its final shape.