Crayon 3D is a project by six students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University in the spring of 2009.

What is the idea?

The idea comes from an old children's book "Harold and his purple crayon". In the story, the protagonist, Harold, is a curious four-year-old boy who, with his purple crayon, has the power to create a world of his own simply by drawing it. You can watch the following video to understand more about the concept.

YouTube 影片

Crayon3D is developing a functional and easy-to-use platform for use with Panda3D. Our end product enables users to create objects by drawing in the air with their fingers, just like the hero of the children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon." The Crayon3D platform provides the following features: - Head Tracking creates a uniquely immersive 3D virtual space - Finger Tracking allows guests to draw in the air - Our Drawing Engine turns the guests' drawings into 3D objects - A Physics Engine allows the objects to interact with each other and their environment Our well-documented API and demo will help you use Crayon3D to create imaginative games and fanciful worlds in a new way. We intend to provide the platform for use in the ETC's Building Virtual Worlds course, beginning in Fall 2009, so that students can explore the possible applications of these features.

More Specific about this Project

What do we want to do:

This project has four parts: head-tracking, finger-tracking, drawing engine and physics engine.
Our goal is to combine these four parts to create a platform for the 2009 fall BVW students.
We hope this platform could inspire the students' imagination and develop some creative games.
The team also has some feature ideas about this platform and hope will come out some demos at the end of the spring semester.

Related Technology:

Johnny's head-tracking&finger tracking research about Wii

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

Crayon Pysics Deluxe

http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/crayon

MIT's Assist Sketch Understanding System and Operation

http://www.blogcadre.com/blog/stella/mits_assist_sketch_understanding_system_and_operation_2006_10_05_11_07_01

Box2d

http://www.box2d.org/

Physics Simulation

http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/wordpress/

Teddy

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy/teddy.html

SmoothTeddy

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/java/smoothteddy/index.html

Fotowooth

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/15/fotowoosh-will-turn-any-picture-into-3d-image/

Why it is important to achieve it:

1. Compared to other movement detection technologies, our facilities are cost-effective and the materials are easily accessible.

2. Based on the work we do, there is the creative scope for other innovators.

3. The technology can possibly lead the new trend in the game world.

4. There are so many possibilities in the Building Virtual World class, we would like to provide another platform for those future students to achieve their creative ideas.

Explain more about what is this platform we are trying to build.

First of all, please take a look about the film from Johnny Lee's head-tracking research:

The following pictures will help you understand what kinds of technology/platform we want to build.

1. Same as what you saw in the video, you could see a 3D environment world by wearing our IR glasses.