Week of 5/21/2014 - 5/27/2014

• Experiments on 3D costumes

I have been focusing on implementing 3D costumes this week, and it works pretty well as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1. Default 2D Costumes

Figure 2. 3D Costumes

Currently, 3D costumes can be loaded from the Import menu like other 2D costumes, and I am forcing the filename of a 3D costume to be "3d-[shape].[extension]" to identify the shape of the 3D costume. For example, the filename of a 3D cylinder has to be "3d-cylinder.png".

As for the color, a (perhaps randomly chosen) color for the default arrow shaped icon is taken over. We can see the colors for 2D costumes used in Figure 1 are also used in 3D costumes in Figure 2.

We can interchangeably select regular 2D and 3D costumes for a single sprite without a problem. Scripts can be written as well for 3D-costumed sprites.

• GUI for 3D shapes

Professor Eglash proposed the following three options for users to select 3D shapes:

 
  1) Each shape appears as an individual codelet:

  2) The shapes are in a drop down from one codelet:

  3) There is a list accessible from the file menu:

After a brief email discussion with the professor, Charles, and myself, we think it is the best if we have both option #1 for the Pen interface, and option #3 for the 3D costume selection interface.

• Issues 
• We cannot directly specify the diameter or length of 3D objects when rendering them using three.js because of the camera position. There may be a way to do it as discussed in this Q&A though.

• How to implement applications like VirtualWigwam ? To dynamically rotate a 3D space, we need to create a 3D stage that allows us to place multiple 3D objects in the same 3D space. That will introduce major design changes from the current C-snap. Perhaps, we should do the above option #1 and #3 on the existing 2D stage first and then implement a 3D stage as another mode ?