I dropped in on SIGGRAPH on Wednesday and, at Alex’s recommendation, checked out the SANDDE system at the Emily Carr University booth.
SANDDE – which stands for Stereoscopic ANimation Drawing DEvice – bills itself as “the world’s first freehand stereoscopic 3D animation software”. What that boils down to is you sit in front of a sensor, moving a stylus in the air while you view a screen through 3D glasses, and watch as a three-dimensional drawing takes shape.
Munro Ferguson, who demoed the system, walked me through some very basic line drawing. (One fun aspect to all of this: the controller for this insanely sophisticated device is the stylus for a Wacom Bamboo, their consumer-grade drawing tablet.) Between rotating the pen to alter the line width, and moving it forward and backward to achieve depth as well as my usual 2D drawing, I found myself concentrating harder than I have in ages.
But I was also more thoroughly absorbed in the sheer process of drawing than I have been in a long time, too. This feels like a completely new medium, and not one where I feel nearly as sure of myself as I do with a piece of paper and a Pigma Micron.
I’m not just talking about technical skill which I gather starts to gel after about a week of using it. I mean the graphic language of 3D compared to 2D, and the way you tell a joke or a story in pictures. Can a gag cartoon – which relies so heavily on that sudden spark of realization and unexpected connection – work as well in a 3D world, which seems to lend itself more to exploration and unfolding?
If you’re in Vancouver for SIGGRAPH, then drop by the Emily Carr booth and see what you think.
When I had a look at it, I immediately thought of the early 20th century invention of the musical instrument called the Theremin, named after it’s inventor, Leon Theremin. I played one of them a couple of times when I was an undergrad. It was a wooden device that looked like a lectern with two antennae attached, one ear-shaped and the other a straight pole. It worked by using the proximity of another object to control 2 parameters: one hand controlled pitch by moving it closer or farther from the pole, and the other controlled volume by moving it closer or further from the ear-shaped antenna. I had the same cognitive load issue you did: it was so difficult to move in 3-D space, mapping it to arbitrary parameters, with nothing to _push against_, nothing to suggest a scale or limit to the control. I could see the SANDDE providing a way to draw layers, by using the mapping in a more sensible way. This rotation to control line width feels arbitrary, though.
The goal of a 3-D drawing created ‘naturally’ is worth thinking about. I could certainly see something exciting about a joke where something on the flat computer screen escaped into the ‘real world’ (or vice versa). Then again, that terrifying scene from ‘The Ring’ keeps coming to mind…
Great comparison, David. You should have seen Munro drawing with this thing. It took him just a few lines, a motion curve, and suddenly there was this bird with an expressive face flying around the screen in three dimensions.
As a cartoonist, I’m amazed (and grateful!) at how willing the brain is to extrapolate a whole world from a few lines. And it makes me think that, for now, while 3D is still a kinda-cool thing we dip into now and again, knowing how to use it is a luxury. In a few short years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re immersed in it… and knowing how to develop everything from doodles to walkthroughs to complex data representations becomes part of the basic skill set for anyone who creates visually as part of their job.
It also won’t surprise me if that’s a much larger number of people than it is today.