Free sketch to free coding
I found the 2D -> 3D drawing tool (Magical Sketch) [Dog demo: press Blue button to see the demo] very encouraging. [Slashdot crowd, as usual, tears it apart.]
What I see in the demo is that it empowers the users to draw in their natural way and then make something much more complex (i.e., 3D image). I'd like to think something similar is possible with programming, be it games or something else. Much like the way BASIC was: I typed in PRINT to get a specific string on the screen.
The dream I have is a tool for my wife to use to create her dance choreography for 5 or 12 dancers using simple sketch layout [be it story boarding the way movies are made or laying out one dancer at a time] and have it synchronized with the music. She should be able to edit individual dancer's movement or whole group [like the outside 4 dancers] in synch. She would "program" her dancers to move in certain patterns (high level programming) and then she would visually edit her performers (low level programming). With multiple dancers, she would want to use computer science ideas like: class inheritance (simple dance has subclass of more complex dance movements), class library (sets of standard dance patterns), polymorphism (two dancers rotating, one to the left, the other to the right). And she should do it all (design, write, simulate, edit (including "configuration management") and then "publish" the result on DVD to handout to her dancers) without realizing she's being a software engineer....
An added bonus would be able to take a digital picture of each dancer and then replace each of the "robot" dancer with the specific dancer's image/avatar.
Another bonus would be to take blueprint of the theater/church stage and then refit the choreography to fit the specific layout.
Or better yet: take few pictures of the place and create 3D image of the location and then fit/resize the dance automagically, so that she can create a DVD which she can show to her dancers as well as to the music committee or board members to get dance's approval. If she can edit out any objectional part on the fly, that would be an icing on the cake...
Copyright 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.
What I see in the demo is that it empowers the users to draw in their natural way and then make something much more complex (i.e., 3D image). I'd like to think something similar is possible with programming, be it games or something else. Much like the way BASIC was: I typed in PRINT to get a specific string on the screen.
The dream I have is a tool for my wife to use to create her dance choreography for 5 or 12 dancers using simple sketch layout [be it story boarding the way movies are made or laying out one dancer at a time] and have it synchronized with the music. She should be able to edit individual dancer's movement or whole group [like the outside 4 dancers] in synch. She would "program" her dancers to move in certain patterns (high level programming) and then she would visually edit her performers (low level programming). With multiple dancers, she would want to use computer science ideas like: class inheritance (simple dance has subclass of more complex dance movements), class library (sets of standard dance patterns), polymorphism (two dancers rotating, one to the left, the other to the right). And she should do it all (design, write, simulate, edit (including "configuration management") and then "publish" the result on DVD to handout to her dancers) without realizing she's being a software engineer....
An added bonus would be able to take a digital picture of each dancer and then replace each of the "robot" dancer with the specific dancer's image/avatar.
Another bonus would be to take blueprint of the theater/church stage and then refit the choreography to fit the specific layout.
Or better yet: take few pictures of the place and create 3D image of the location and then fit/resize the dance automagically, so that she can create a DVD which she can show to her dancers as well as to the music committee or board members to get dance's approval. If she can edit out any objectional part on the fly, that would be an icing on the cake...
Copyright 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.
posted by DannyHSDad at
10:20 PM
