Could this be applied to UV/texture mapping? I can see reversing the folding would be really helpful to texture map more easily.
From what I can tell, it appears that there are many locations where the original plane overlaps. If it is possible to easily calculate adjacency for those triangles, you would be able to properly do filtering lookups.
Another question is how much overlapping there is. The more there is, the more you potentially waste texture resolution.
Still, cool idea...