Easy Origami

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  Origami selection menu

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  Folding a dog face

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  Resizing the model

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  Palm menu

Inspiration

I started making origami when I was about 10 years old, and ever since then, if I'm bored and have a piece of paper around, I fold something quickly to pass the time or simply to relax and think.

Sometimes though, specially for beginners, some folds are not easy to see or clear enough. Typically you look for video tutorials, but often, given the nature of using your hands to fold, some folds are obscured by the hands, and you really wish you could have another angle to see it better. That's where the idea of an MR app that teaches you origami came from!

What it does

Easy Origami gives you step-by-step tutorials to fold origami. You can move the virtual paper, resize it, rotate it and place it wherever you feel you get the best view. Also, you have several "playback" controls to see each fold as fast or slow as you want.

The folding lines can be toggled, and you can lock the model in place to avoid accidentally moving/resizing it.

How we built it

I used Godot to build the app and Blender to model and animate the paper. I make use of Passthrough and Hand Tracking, as well as hand occlusion using the hand meshes provided by Meta.

In terms of UX, I wanted the whole app to simply enhance the experience of making origami, which means you should have the least amount of UI or distractions at all time.

Challenges we ran into

Well, the fact that I only have a Quest 2 to test on. The Passthrough on the Quest 2 is not ideal for this, since you can't see the folds that well, but other than that the experience is really smooth!

Hand tracking is also a bit unreliable at the moment, so tweaking values to get clicking/grabbing to feel natural was time-consuming as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm very proud of the 3D models I managed to create and animate to recreate the way you should do each fold, but most importantly, I believe the user experience that you get when using the app feels very natural.

The way you interact with the menus and how straightforward everything feels is what I'm most proud of, I'd say.

What we learned

A lot! I've never worked with MR/AR before, and things like interactions without controllers, hand occlusion and others were really interesting challenges.

What's next for Easy Origami

I would hope to add more models/tutorials in the future! Maybe categorize them by difficulty and improve based on user feedback.

Also, having a website where people can download origami templates (with lines) to help with the folding process.

Built With

• blender
• gdscript
• godot