4Doodle: Two-handed Gestures for Immersive Sketching of Architectural Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces 4Doodle, an affordable immersive virtual environment enabling two-handed gestures for sketching and content creation in 3D, enhancing interaction space and usability for architects and engineers.

Contribution

It presents a novel bi-manual gesture system using proxy geometry and laser metaphors for immersive 3D sketching in head-mounted display setups, expanding interaction capabilities.

Findings

Prototype offers 24 cubic meters of movement space.

System demonstrates effective sketching with bi-manual gestures.

Preliminary user study shows promise for architectural design applications.

Abstract

Three-dimensional immersive sketching for content creation and modeling has been studied for some time. However, research in this domain mainly focused on CAVE-like scenarios. These setups can be expensive and offer a narrow interaction space. Building more affordable setups using head-mounted displays is possible, allowing greater immersion and a larger space for user physical movements. This paper presents a fully immersive environment using bi-manual gestures to sketch and create content freely in the virtual world. This approach can be applied to many scenarios, allowing people to express their ideas or review existing designs. To cope with known motor difficulties and inaccuracy of freehand 3D sketching, we explore proxy geometry and a laser-like metaphor to draw content directly from models and create content surfaces. Our current prototype offers 24 cubic meters for movement, limited by the room size. It features infinite virtual drawing space through pan and scale techniques and is larger than the typical 6-sided cave at a fraction of the cost. In a preliminary study conducted with architects and engineers, our system showed a clear promise as a tool for sketching and 3D content creation in virtual reality with a great emphasis on bi-manual gestures.