Sketch Your Own Furniture

During the summer of 2005, I interned at Apple Computer for three months. Every summer, Apple holds an iContest for the interns to come up with innovative ideas involving Apple products. You can design anything you want, ranging from marketing to modification of hardware. There were some good ideas, and there were some awful ones. Most of the awful ones made it to the final round, and my only consolation is that the team who won actually had a really neat product.

There were some good ideas being thrown around. Zack for example came up with a client/server central database system for hospitals to allow doctors to easily interact with lab tests using Xserve RAID. Neil and Ryan fiddled with GPS in Powerbook (thanks Ryan!), and Kevin "Fan Boy" (the team that won) came up with Gestures!, an image recognition software that can trace the movements of hands via a camera and map the result to a command in Mac OS X. The best of part of Kevin's demonstration during the final round was that a middle finger at the camera will do a 'kill -9' on the active window.

Being an idealistic sop that I am, and knowing that Apple and PIXAR are very close (or were, I don't know about now), my proposal was iHolo, a three dimensional drawing environment where the user actually interacts and views his results in three dimension. Currently we are mostly translating the idea of two to three dimension via clever use of alpha channel or stereograms. iHolo will allow the user to draw in the air, and view his results realtime in the sensor area where he is drawing as well as in a holographic screen. Of course, we don't have the technology for the latter, but the iContest did allow concept projects. Needless to say, I didn't make it to the final round, since it didn't involve existing Apple products. iHolo was by no means an original concept...just something that I'd love to have when I was a kid.

So enough with the introduction. Sketch-A-Furniture is almost exactly what I was going for with iHolo interface-wise, except the result would not be plastic resin but displayed within the user's drawing area and on the holographic screen.