Often, to get kids excited about science, you need to give them something from their own lives to which they can relate. That is the idea behind virtual Play-Doh™, which was developed by students in Temple’s College of Engineering, and demonstrated for about 50 students from Philadelphia’s Thomas Sharp Elementary School and Collingswood High School in New Jersey last Friday during National Engineers Week.

Utilizing a wiimote, a computer, infra-red LEDs, and anaglyph imagery, the Temple students created virtual Play-Doh™, which is a proto-type of a novel interface for working with a 3-D model on your computer, said Temple engineering undergraduate Ethan Rublee, one the creators.  “Virtual Play-Doh™ maps your physical movements with what’s happening in 3-D on the computer.”

While the main purpose of the virtual Play-Doh™ is to get kids excited about engineering—and the demonstration brought a number of ooohs and aaahs from Friday’s audience—it does have practical applications in the field of augmented reality, and can be used in such things as surgery or on the military battlefield.

“Augmented reality is an area of research that involves laying computer graphics on top of what we see,” said Rublee, who works under Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Li Bai in the Computer Fusion Lab. “So it’s mixing virtual reality with the real reality that’s happening around us.”