Drawing on Air: Input Techniques for Controlled 3D Line Illustration

Abstract

Abstract-We present Drawing on Air, a haptic-aided input technique for drawing controlled 3D curves through space. Drawing on Air addresses a control problem with current 3D modeling approaches based on sweeping movement of the hands through the air. While artists praise the immediacy and intuitiveness of these systems, a lack of control makes it nearly impossible to create 3D form that goes beyond quick design sketches or gesture drawings. Drawing on Air introduces two new strategies for more controlled 3D drawing: one-handed drag drawing and two-handed tape drawing. Both approaches have advantages for drawing certain types of curves, or sections of a curve. We describe a tangent preserving method for transitioning between the two techniques while drawing. Haptic-aided redrawing and line weight adjustment while drawing are also supported in both approaches. In a quantitative user study evaluation by illustrators, the one and two-handed techniques performed at roughly the same level, while both of them significantly outperformed freehand drawing and freehand drawing augmented with a haptic friction effect. We present the design and results of this experiment as well as user feedback from artists and 3D models created in a style of line illustration for challenging artistic and scientific subjects.

Authoring and animating painterly characters

“…Work in ab initio design uses drawing [Cohen et al 2000;Bourguignon et al 2001;Tolba et al 2001;Keefe et al 2007;Rivers et al 2010] or painting [Keefe et al 2001] to create objects and environments from scratch, but lacks the painterly aesthetic possible with traditional 2D digital painting systems. This limitation is addressed by embedding painted strokes on [Teece 1998;Daniels 1999] or near ] a 3D proxy shape and replacing traditional rendering with a "repainting" algorithm that ensures every painted stroke is faithfully represented in the final imagery.…”

Scientific Sketching for Collaborative VR Visualization Design

“…Designs created during studies 1, 2, and 3 also appear in [11], [14], and [15]. New in this treatment are more detailed descriptions of these studies and the discussion of how insights from this work come together to inform Scientific Sketching.…”

“…This problem has fueled several investigations into new techniques and models for understanding 3D computer input [12]. One result of this work is a more precise haptic-aided 3D drawing tool called Drawing on Air [15]. As compared to previous VR systems such as CavePainting, Drawing on Air increases control while maintaining the immediate exploratory qualities of modeling tools based on 3D drawing.…”

“…The 3D drawing tools used in study 4 make use of the interfaces of the Drawing-on-Air system [15] and a nonhaptic implementation of the drag and tape-mode interfaces of Drawing on Air adapted to work in the larger VR environment of the Cave. Since the interfaces used to generate hand-drawn 3D models with these tools have been described in detail elsewhere, we limit our discussion in the next sections to new specific extensions to support Scientific Sketching.…”

Expressive cutting, deforming, and painting of three-dimensional digital shapes through asymmetric bimanual haptic manipulation

“…(1998). Anecdotal evidence (Gregory, et al, 2000;Sener, et al, 2003) and user evaluations (De Boeck, et al, 2006;Hinckley, et al, 1998;Keefe, et al, 2007) suggest a substantial advantage for interactions via 3D haptic force feedback compared to the traditional 2D mouse/keyboard systems. In the area of surgical training, many efforts have centered around real-time interactions with 3D representations (tissue, organs), for cutting with a haptic virtual scalpel see e.g., (Lim, Jin, & De, 2007;Viet, et al, 2006).…”