CubeDraw: 360° Capture Browser App

The Annotated Reality Design for Novices project's CubeDraw explores a way for non-technical co-designers to express their ideas for a 360° world through paper-prototyping brainstorming approaches, and potentially work with a design partner with basic programming experience, to rapidly bring it to life.

Below is an example of how a team could utilize 360° storytelling or brainstorming in support of prototyping a VR/AR experience. To begin, they might express an immersive scene by utilizing six squares of paper to draw a "full" 360° scene as if on the inside of a cube or sphere (the following example shows guide lines on the paper for the "true/straight" lines of where the "ground" would be in the sphere, as well as where "looking up in the sky" would begin.

First, you will need to draw the "cubed" scene. You should download this PDF packet which has the sheets and some basic directions on preparing to draw your immersive scene on them.

Once having created the scene as a drawing on paper, and written a story or explanation about it, the next step is to digitize the paper drawings, convert them into a format ready for VR (an equirectangular image), and view them on your device.

The full CubeDraw page describes a way to do this carefully and with a high level of precision. However, with low-fidelity techniques this might not be necessary. It might be preferable to be able to load the immersive scene into a viewer quickly, even if with slight imperfections. That is what the browser-based Capture360 app accomplishes.

Capture360 supports the ability to do on-the-fly "scanning" of the six squares and the generation of the equirectangular image, all on a mobile device which can be used as a "magic window" into the scene, or if done using a smartphone with gyroscope and compass can be used with a "cardboard" headset device and the phone.

With this app, the six squares of the drawing can be "scanned in" one at a time by setting up a dark-colored two-pocket folder as an easel

and photographing each of them in turn with the app
which loads them into a staging area

from which you can then generate and view the 360° "experience" right on the device, as you are being told the story/idea/etc.

Note that this app is meant to be more lightweight, and require no programming skills, so it does not support the addition of the "info" buttons.

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For more information about this project, please contact Evan Golub