Maliang

Description

Many of us grew up with the Chinese tale of Ma Liang, the boy whose magic brush made every painting real. Maliang turns that wish into a VR ritual, a gift for the child in us who believed drawings could come alive.

You sit on a lotus throne above a sea of clouds, before a desk and a blank scroll. Paint with a calligraphy brush in ten inks, then press a seal: the Wu seal summons an object, the Jing seal summons a place. The scroll rises, and you set it alight with a candle.

The burning is the loading bar. While the scroll burns, AI works behind the scenes: GPT reads what you drew (a scribble crumbles to ash, leaving a short reply), Tripo turns it into a 3D model, rigged and animated if it is a creature, with sound from ElevenLabs, and World Labs grows a landscape into a Gaussian-splat world around you, with its own ambience. When the scroll burns away, your creation steps out of the embers, or a real landscape unfolds all around you.

Every work is rolled up and kept in the desk drawers, ready to be burned and relived; burning the sky scroll returns you to the clouds. Without a network connection or API keys, the bundled works still let the whole ritual play out offline.

Maliang is a PC VR app built and tested on PICO. The 6DoF controllers carry the ritual: grip the brush, press harder for a bolder stroke, feel the paper through haptics, stamp a seal and hold a candle to the scroll. Through OpenXR, the same build runs on other PC VR headsets.

How Tripo was used

Tripo plays two roles in Maliang: it built the world's hero props, and it drives the Wu seal at runtime.

• Hero props: the lotus throne, candle stand, inkstone and both seals were modeled with Tripo, all PBR and tuned for VR. The bronze Wu seal is stamped with Tripo's logo, the jade Jing seal with World Labs'.
• The Wu seal: GPT reads the sketch, GPT Image refines it, and Tripo models, rigs and animates it before ElevenLabs gives it a voice.
• The burning scroll: the fire follows Tripo's real task progress, so the wait becomes the ritual.