Project

[xRLab] Virtual PlayDoh

JinCheng Li, student in the bachelor's degree program in Mechanical Engineeringsupervised by Prof. Dr. Johannes Tümler, pursued the idea of transferring play dough and modeling clay as a process into a virtual environment as part of his internship.

Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to enhance our physical experiences and transport us into virtual worlds. One interesting application of VR is the simulation of play dough - a material often associated with creative play and child development.
Virtual PlayDoh now aims to enable users to shape and manipulate digital play dough. The program uses special controllers that track the user's movements and gestures and transfer them to the virtual space in real time. Users can mold, pull, push and rotate the playdoh to create different shapes and textures.
One of the great advantages of Virtual PlayDoh is that there is none of the mess that comes with using real playdoh. Users can save their creations, edit them and restore them later. In addition, different colors and textures can be selected to further personalize Virtual PlayDoh creations.

Virtual PlayDoh could also find application in education. Similar to engaging with real play dough, children can be creative with the application and improve their fine motor skills at the same time. Teachers can use the application to demonstrate and experiment with concepts such as shapes, texture and colors. Overall, Virtual PlayDoh offers an interesting and entertaining way to utilize the benefits of VR while promoting creativity and fine motor skills.

The aim is therefore to establish VR simulation modelling clay as an educational tool. In perspective, a social and cooperative environment can be developed for the application example developed in JinCheng's internship, in which processes can be explored and designed together.

JinCheng has implemented Virtual PlayDoh using Unity. For the implementation of real-time deformation in virtual reality, he drew on ideas from the finite element method. His approach, from modeling and programming to evaluation and outlook, is described in his term paper in his term paper - visual impressions can be found in the video.