Microsoft Research

John SanGiovanni from Microsoft Research spoke at CMU yesterday. He covered a whole slew of emerging technologies, including a particularly cool three-dimensional sketching application for the Tablet PC called 3D Journal. Here's how it works. You draw a sketch of a cube, much as you might draw with the paintbrush in Photoshop. The program recognizes that your two-dimensional drawing represents a three-dimensional object. It then allows you to rotate your drawing in three dimensions, adjusting the perspective and geometry of the actual sketch in real time to show how it might look from the side, or the back. It's jaw- droppingly amazing.

Almost immediately after though, I started to wonder, how useful is the ability to rotate such a simple three-dimensional object? Luckily, the researchers at Cornell who came up with the implementation have developed a pretty robust system. This presentation of their research [PDF 1.1MB] shows some appropriately complex wireframes.

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