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New "Mental Canvas" Drawing App Looks Freaking Amazing

Together with the Surface Studio, it provides a wicked way to go from 2D to 3D

By Rain Noe - November 14, 2016

Good on Microsoft for not only dreaming up the Surface Studio, but finding app developers that totally get what it's capable of and understand how designers sketch. In the last entry, we caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a flythroughs of 3D spaces that had apparently been sketched, plane by plane, in 2D:

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That app is called Mental Canvas, and it looks freaking amazing:

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To be sure, this looks better-suited for architects and environments designers rather than us industrial designers working on 3D objects—the planar nature of buildings and walls seems the most natural fit for the technology. But that's just my impression after seeing the video and the flythroughs. We'll have to wait until this app is in the hands of a DiTullo or Nugent to see what it can do for us.

Mental Canvas is based on technology developed by Julie Dorsey, a Computer Science professor at Yale University, and her research team. As of toda, you can download a player that will allow you to interact with drawings that the development team has created. The app itself will be available when the Surface Studio launches in mid-December.

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New "Mental Canvas" Drawing App Looks Freaking Amazing

Mike Jelinek

3 years ago

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Looks really cool! It reminds me uMake on iPad or TiltBrush in VR.

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Laurent Pastorelli

3 years ago

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early 2000 there was this 3d drawing software called Rhonda, very cool to draw in 3D but it was quite hard to master (I never did):
http://rhondaforever.com/
this mental canvas look much more practical and easy to use.

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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.