A Light-weight Mobile Education App for 3D Modelling Course Teaching

The 3D modelling course teaching usually needs the usage of the professional software tools, such as SolidWorks, AutoCAD and Maya, which require heavy memory cost and needs to be installed on the PC system. The teaching place and respondents are thus usually limited by this condition. With the popularity of mobile devices in the students' learning behaviors, it is expected to have a 3D modeling education App on the easy-portable smartphone or smart pad, so that the teacher can carry out the 3D modeling teaching easily in the common labs without these professional software or even in the classroom without the PC system. Though most of the mobile devices have been equipped with the touch screen, which allows intuitive inputs for the user via finger gestures, there are still no standard gestures for 3D model manipulation, thus the development of a light-weight tool for 3D modeling and editing for the smart devices is a promising research topic for the 3D modeling course teaching. In this paper, a light-weight mobile App is developed for 3D modeling course teaching by designing a set of multi-touch gesture operations specifically for the smartphone or smart pad. The teachers can lead the students to design 3D models with this App easily and effectively.