Crayon

Mobile AR Painting

Unity for iOS

MVC Architecture

Master's Thesis

Design for Play

UI/UX

Creating a tool for artists to bridge physical and digital worlds.

Background

During my first term in graduate school in Fall 2021, I took a course on AR/VR development. My final project for the class was a spatial painting app inspired by the 1955 children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon." As a sculptor and technologist, I became transfixed by this new 3D artistic medium and continued to work on Crayon after the class, eventually making it the subject of my Master's Thesis. The goal for the project was to create an expressive tool for non-technical people to explore their surroundings in a new way. Furthermore, I collaborated with painter Turiya Adkins to design it a tool for artists hoping to add a new dimension to analog works.

Learn more details about the context, design and development of Crayon in my Master's Thesis.

Product Overview

Experience & Interface

Collaboration with painter Turiya Adkins

During the process of user-testing, painter friends consistently created the most visually engaging works. Turiya Adkins used Crayon to augment her piece "Now My Eyes Will be Open." Adkins

Initial Sketch

Saved/Exported Version

Custom Stamps

The "real" canvas painting contains patches of these detailed marks that impart tremendous texture. Adkins draws similar ones in her notebook. She took a picture of it as a sample and we extracted the png and used it as imported stamp throughout the piece.

Other Experiments

Hand Gesture Spawning

ManoMotion SDK (2021)

Stable Diffusion

Via Hugging Face (2022)

Boids

Algorithm by Craig Reynolds