Gallery: An Oculus Rift Hack That Lets You Draw in 3-D
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Gravity Sketch brings sketching to the worlds of augmented and virtual reality.
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Artists hold the acrylic drawing tablet like its analog counterpart and and sketch on the surface with a custom stylus. All the while, radio frequency sensors are recording the movements and coordinates of the pad and reporting them to an Arduino hidden in the black box on its edge.
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The real trick of GravitySketch is that instead of requiring artists to master artistic tricks like perspective or foreshortening to suggest depth and physicality, they can simply rotate the tablet and draw lines that connect to their previous marks, creating a sense of form in the process.
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GravitySketch is a high-tech sketchpad that looks a bit like a prop from *Tron* with an etched grid made of transparent plastic and a sternly rectilinear user interface panel. But its goal is to make augmented reality feel as organic as sketching in a notebook.
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Instead of making people experts at 3-D, the team realized that the goal should be to bring a 2-D experience to multiple planes. With insight in hand, the team began the long process of transforming a concept into a cool tool.
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"The most interesting is how people use it and what kind of ideas it triggers when they do," says GravitySketch co-creator Guillaume Couche.
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The GravitySketch team believes a lot of potentially gifted designers are scared away from the field because the tools are intimidating. Their goal is to simplify them.
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"We started with the idea to draw volumes in sections and almost accidentally added the possibility to rotate, which now seems very obvious," says Couche.
