CAMBRIDGE — Imagine using the tiny light on a smartphone to draw shapes in the air that are captured in three dimensions by a computer program and can be rotated and viewed from any angle.
As recently as Saturday, this program did not exist, but the hours-old technology took first prize Sunday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first HackMIT, a student-run competition that drew undergraduate and high school programmers from across North America and overseas.
The developers of the program, called Lightboard, were Victor Hung, 20, and Vincent Siao, 21, high school friends from Vancouver, British Columbia. Hung and Siao said they set out to record flat drawings, but discovered that it was possible to view the images in three dimensions.
Advertisement
“We realized we could capture the depth of the light just based on the size” of the beam as it is recorded by the device, said Hung, a senior computer science major at MIT.
“Victor has some really crazy-cool...
learn more
