Bender 3D

Devin Finkel, Ben Quach

What are you building?

“We’re making a 3D scupting program that can be used with a Kinect instead of a tablet or mouse. We want the user to be able to control what they’re building directly with their hands. It’s more pervasive.”

How does it work?

“We can detect both of the user’s hands with the Kinect. One hand selects vertices on the mesh and the other hand manipulates those vertices with operations such as transform or rotate.”

What are some technical challenges of what you’re building?

“Basically we had to rewrite the exporter because it doesn’t work with C#. We also had to write custom shaders for the vertexes.”

Small hackathons or large hackathons?

“Hackathons are a good place to get your creativity out. Smaller hackathons are better for thinking about your ideas but larger hackathons are much better for networking and bouncing your ideas off of a diverse group of people.”

How do hackathons differ from school?

“At hackathons, you’re more focused on getting stuff done. You have a lot more freedom! At school it’s more structured and there’s not as much of a chance to build what you want. There’s a place for both in an education.”

Do you wish there were more hackathons?

My body doesn’t.