GenAI · VR · Tripothon · 2026

Maliang 马良

A VR ritual inspired by the Chinese tale of the magic brush: paint on a scroll, stamp a seal, set it on fire, and your drawing comes alive as a 3D creature or a whole world.

Team: Qinchuan Zhang · Solo
Type: Hackathon · GenAI × VR
Event: Tripothon Demo Day · San Francisco · Oct 8, 2026
Stack: Unity 6 · OpenXR · PICO · Tripo AI · World Labs · GPT Image · ElevenLabs
Date: Oct 2026 · built in 2 days

Overview

Maliang is a boy from a Chinese folk tale whose magic brush made everything he painted real. This project turns that tale into a VR ritual. You sit at a scholar's desk on a lotus throne above the clouds, paint on a scroll with a calligraphy brush, press a seal onto it, and hold a candle to the paper. When the last ember fades, your drawing steps out of the ashes: a rigged, animated 3D creature with its own voice, or an entire Gaussian splat world that blooms around your desk.

A cat, from ink to life

Every summon follows the same ritual. The sealed painting floats in front of you, the candle sets it alight, and when the paper burns away the result appears exactly where the scroll was floating. This cat lands on the desk, plays its animation and meows.

Any object

Anything GPT can recognise can be summoned. Living things are rigged and animated; still objects like this watermelon arrive as detailed PBR models you can pick up and turn in your hands.

Or a whole world

With the Jing seal, the painting becomes the place you stand in. A few strokes of hills and a tree grow into a World Labs meadow that unfolds around the lotus throne, with its own ambient sound.

The burning is the loading bar

Generation takes time, so the waiting became the ritual. Once stamped, the scroll rises and floats in front of you. GPT reads the drawing and decides whether it is recognisable and what to make; GPT Image redraws it as a clean reference; Tripo or World Labs builds it while ElevenLabs creates its sound. The fire waits for the AI's verdict, then follows the real generation progress to the end. A scribble the brush cannot understand simply crumbles to ash.

Painting with a real brush

The brush is a physical tool, not a pointer. Press it deeper into the paper and the stroke gets bolder; the bristles bend with the motion and the controller's haptics let you feel the paper. Dip it into one of ten traditional pigments to change colour, and undo up to twenty strokes until the seal goes down. Once stamped, the painting is final.

Two seals, two kinds of magic

The seal decides what the painting becomes. The bronze Wu (物) seal, carved with the Tripo logo, summons an object: Tripo AI turns the drawing into a 3D model, then rigs and animates it. The jade Jing (境) seal, carved with the World Labs logo, summons a place: World Labs' Marble grows a full Gaussian splat world around the lotus throne, with an ElevenLabs ambience to match. The seals themselves, the lotus throne, the candle stand and the inkstone are all Tripo generated props.

Kept in the drawers

Every work is rolled up and kept in the desk drawers with its seal on a paper tag. Lay one on the desk and burn it again to relive it, or burn the sky scroll to clear a world and return to the clouds. Bundled works and a keyword fallback keep the experience complete even offline.

A world around the throne

A Jing scroll never teleports you away. The desk stays where it is and the generated world unfolds around the lotus throne, scaled and grounded to the platform, while the fire and embers still draw in front of the splats.

Built solo in two days with an AI agent

I built Maliang alone in two days, developing on a PICO headset, with Claude Opus 5.5 working in the Unity editor through Unity MCP. The agent wrote and debugged the code, ran every step in play mode, and even recorded the demo footage, which left me free to focus on the experience and the design decisions.

Culture is not a free pass

Maliang borrows a lot from Chinese tradition: the tale, the ink, the seals, the scroll. But I believe culture, or any message a project wants to promote, can never excuse bad interaction. Bad is bad, good is good. My test was simple: strip out every cultural element, and the loop of painting, stamping, burning and watching it come alive should still be worth playing. Great interaction is what makes people who know nothing about a culture curious to learn more; bad interaction only gives them another reason to walk away.