Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: RUI: Drawing from Life in Extended Reality: Advancing and Teaching Cross-Reality User Interfaces for Observational 3D Sketching

该项目推进了人们如何在跨越现实世界、虚拟现实（VR）以及介于两者之间的数字+物理混合空间的未来计算环境中有效和创造性地工作的科学。由于绘图是跨许多学科（例如，产品设计，建筑，工程，艺术）创造性工作的基础，因此研究人员将重点放在3D绘图的新兴媒介上，这是一种计算机辅助绘图形式，其中3D跟踪笔的横扫运动用于创建似乎漂浮在空中的虚拟3D绘图。在艺术家、建筑师、产品设计师、工程师和其他人的手中，虚拟现实3D绘图技术已经导致了令人兴奋的新设计过程和产品。然而，尽管有一些早期的成功和巨大的潜力，3D绘图，像许多其他早期的虚拟现实应用程序，仍然是有限的，相比之下，现实世界的传统绘图。以艺术家和产品设计师学习绘画的方式为例；在现实世界中学习绘画始于学习观察，即仔细观察一个主题。对于先进的抽屉来说，从观察中绘制现实世界的图画甚至是研究一个主题的一种方式，一种探索的模式。然而，在虚拟环境中的创造性工作采取相反的方法，用户拥有强大的工具和无尽的3D画布，但没有办法将这些连接到他们的笔记，草图，模型，实验和其他现实世界的工件。该项目展示了3D绘图的新愿景，使其适用于具有现实世界主题的有影响力的工作（例如，在实验室或现场工作的科学家，进行设计审查的工程师，为社会变革而工作的艺术家）。关键的方法是重新中心3D绘图，和其他创造性的任务通常在虚拟环境中执行，在仔细观察的基本技能。具体而言，该项目开发了新的增强现实和混合现实（AR和MR）工具，用于从多个角度进行观察，并使用这些观察结果创建3D绘图。这些基础工具的成功是在基于实验室的用户研究中评估的。综合教育计划创建了大学课程和教育材料，以培养学生在这些新的跨现实工作模式中的能力，并培养潜在的3D绘图讲师在AR中教授这种新型观察3D绘图的能力。计算机科学和艺术/设计学科的本科生都被培训为跨学科研究团队的关键成员。先前对3D绘图的研究使3D笔更加可控，并产生了许多令人兴奋的软件工具，但它们都没有帮助人们在现实中画出他们所看到的东西。该项目创建了新颖的用户界面技术和视点熵算法，通过识别、可视化和导航最有用的视点来观察现实世界的主题，从而进行观察（例如，判断相对比例、角度和负空间）。它还开发空间用户界面，通过混合2D+3D草图界面和基于计算机图形草图的3D建模算法，将观测结果转换为手绘3D形式。对现实世界观察的深入关注使所提出的技术成为跨现实用户界面新兴研究的理想范例，这些界面支持现实、虚拟和两者之间的混合空间之间的无缝过渡。该项目包括一个紧密整合的教育计划，开发的新系统将部署在多个机构的教室中。开发的新技术和教育模块的成功和潜力将通过实验室和课堂用户研究相结合的方式进行评估。这项研究将为使用3D绘画作为一种探究模式打开大门，利用绘画的表现力来代表我们周围的世界。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project advances the science of how people work effectively and creatively within future computing environments that span the real world, virtual reality (VR), and mixed digital+physical spaces in between. Since drawing is fundamental to creative work across many disciplines (e.g., product design, architecture, engineering, art), the investigators focus on the emerging medium of 3D drawing, a form of computer-aided drawing where sweeping movements of a 3D-tracked pen are used to create virtual 3D drawings that appear to float in the air. In the hands of artists, architects, product designers, engineers, and others, virtual reality 3D drawing technologies have already led to exciting new design processes and products. However, despite some early successes and the great potential, 3D drawing, like so many other early applications of VR, remains limited when compared to the physical, real-world counterpart of traditional drawing. Take, for example, the way artists and product designers are taught to draw; learning to draw in the real world starts with learning to see, i.e., making careful observations of a subject. For advanced drawers, real-world drawing from observation is even a way to study a subject, a mode of inquiry. Yet, creative work in virtual environments takes the opposite approach, users have powerful tools and an endless 3D canvas, but no means of connecting these to their notes, sketches, models, experiments, and other real-world artifacts. This project presents a new vision for 3D drawing that makes it applicable to impactful work with real-world subjects (e.g., scientists working in the laboratory or the field, engineers conducting a design review, artists working for social change). The key approach is to re-center 3D drawing, and other creative tasks typically performed in virtual environments, on the foundational skill of careful observation. Specifically, the project develops new Augmented- and Mixed-Reality (AR and MR) tools for making observations from multiple perspectives and using those observations to create 3D drawings. The success of these foundational tools is assessed in lab-based user studies. The integrated educational program creates college courses and educational materials to train students in these new cross-reality modes of working and build capacity among potential 3D drawing instructors for teaching this new style of observational 3D drawing in AR. Undergraduate students in both computer science and art/design disciplines are trained as key members of the interdisciplinary research team.Prior research on 3D drawing has made 3D pens more controllable and led to many exciting software tools, but none of them help people to work across realities to draw what they see. This project creates novel user interface techniques and viewpoint entropy algorithms for making observations (e.g., judging relative proportion, angles, and negative space) by identifying, visualizing, and navigating the most useful viewpoints for observations of a real-world subject. It also develops spatial user interfaces for translating observations into hand-drawn 3D forms with hybrid 2D+3D sketching interfaces and computer graphics sketch-based 3D modeling algorithms. The deep focus on real-world observation makes the proposed techniques ideal examples of emerging research on cross-reality user interfaces that support seamless transitions between reality, virtuality, and mixed spaces in between. The project includes a tightly integrated educational plan, and the novel systems developed will be deployed in classrooms at multiple institutions. The success and potential of the new technologies and educational modules developed will be assessed through a combination of lab- and classroom-based user studies. This research effort will open the door to using 3D drawing as a mode of inquiry to leverage drawing's expressive power for representing the world around us.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.