News Smart software makes sense of rough sketches

From New Scientist:

Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs.

In designing the software, developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have had to tackle several tough tasks. First the software must recognise crude hand-drawn shapes in the way the user intended for example, by spotting that four wiggly lines represent a square with straight sides.

Then it has to recognise the context of the objects being sketched, in the same way that we interpret two circles under a box on a slope as some kind of vehicle on wheels. Finally, the package has to animate the sketch so that objects move as they would do in the real world.

Current sketching software only recognises the geometry of a sketch - for example, that two lines meet at a specific angle - and cannot recognise context at all.

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