Microsoft’s Surface tablet will have another available drawing application with the debut of Mental Canvas later this year. The application is a spatial drawing platform that adds 3D context to 2D sketching for those, like designers, architects, and engineers, who uses drawing to share ideas.
The technology that powers the application was originally developed by a research team at Yale University led by computer science professor Julie Dorsey, the company’s founder and chief executive officer.
It allows creators to illustrate ideas and depict design concepts digitally. Though the authoring software will be available before year’s end, the company recently released a player app in the Windows Store over which viewers can see spatial drawings created using the Mental Canvas authoring software, Dorsey said.
Architects, designers and engineers can use the tool to develop concepts and communicate them to clients. Professional illustrators, storytellers and game developers can use the tool’s workflow capabilities to take ideas from concept to polished final version. Scientists and teachers will use Mental Canvas to communicate structure and connections between abstract concepts in an interactive and annotatable format, she added.
The tool supports supports sketching on and navigating among multiple canvases situated in a virtual space. The resulting interactive and animated scene can be shared on any device with a web browser. By saving important views, users can create personalized, animated tours through any scene. They can also switch between viewing and drawing modes to refine their designs at all stages of the creative process and quickly edit complex designs.
“Mental Canvas pushes the boundaries of sketch, bringing an element of exploration that’s just not possible with pen and paper,” said Panos Panay, corporate vice president of devices at Microsoft. “This is a great example of hardware and software coming together to harness pen, touch and the new Surface Dial to help architects, designers and engineers bring their ideas to life in a more natural and personal way.”
The drawing application joins Catchbook, from Siemens PLM, which was introduced earlier this year for the Surface and other devices. That drawing and tracing app for tablets and smartphones that converts freehand drawings into accurate 2D designs.
The app can also be used to simply sketch ideas, just as one would do using pencil and paper, but it can create precise, to-scale drawings that can be used for planning and construction. The drawings can be edited via simple push and pull.
That app was designed to be a digital version of the proverbial napkin sketch. Developed by Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software business, Catchbook is built on the company’s industrial sketching technology.
Catchbook gives users the ability to draw freely, or import an image or photograph and sketch over it to add details. Users rarely have to activate a menu or command.
The engineering software manufacturer planned the app with an eye toward allowing engineers to share technical illustrations and designs with suppliers, customers, and nonCAD users. The mobile capability allows users to bring their designs with them wherever they’d take a tablet, whether to a shop floor or a remote meeting, said Ken Hosch, director of strategy at Siemens PLM.
“In talking with engineers, participation is a real challenge in a technical environment, when you have to show participants the scale and help them understand the sense of size,” he said.
The app is meant to resemble drawing on paper, which, Hosch said, is the way everyone learned to draw and which most people still feel comfortable with.
So it seems, as app makers want to mimic basic drawing capabilities, paper-based, 2-D drawings aren’t dead after all.
Filed Under: 3D CAD World