Video game players have Stanford researchers to thank for the latest innovation in 3-D design. Last month, the Virtual Worlds Group — a research group in the Computer Science department — released a software program called Dryad that facilitates the creation of three-dimensional trees for use in virtual worlds and games.

High-quality three-dimensional content can be found in games such as World of Warcraft or online social communities like Second Life. The process of creating this content is generally extremely difficult.

“There is a very, very tiny community of people around the world who are skilled at creating three-dimensional objects, and they are the ones who do it all,” said Computer Science Assistant Prof. Vladlen Koltun, head of the project. “[This] is one of the reasons why you don’t see three-dimensional content on the Web; because nobody can create it.”

The developers of Dryad aim to make 3-D content creation — specifically, the creation of trees — more accessible to individuals with no special training. The software allows users to intuitively “create” trees by visually navigating to them. Dryad allows the user to explore a multi-dimensional design space as if it were a city map.

“What’s especially cool about Dryad is the fact that as users pick out good trees, their choices are used to guide the choices of future users,” said Daniel Gibson ‘09, who worked extensively on the project.

Since not all trees are equally desirable, Dryad has a built-in mathematical model that leads users toward trees that have some resemblance to trees that have proven popular with other users.

The Dryad program is but the first of a series of modeling tools the Virtual Worlds Group plans to create in order to allow casual users to design high-quality 3-D content. The group decided to start with trees rather than, for instance, houses or people, because the trees of the real world have been catalogued and categorized particularly thoroughly by botanists.

Dryad can be downloaded for free at http://dryad.stanford.edu.