Highly interactive 3D user interfaces

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This proposal concerns the research and development of new techniques for the design and understanding of free-form surfaces. Examples of free-form surfaces include car bodies, ship hulls, and fanciful creatures in video games. The proposed work is aims to improve the design and understanding of free-form surfaces through the use of hand-held 3D position and orientation trackers. In MeshSculptor, our experimental free-form editor, a real-time graphics system continuously animates the edited surface as the user sits in front of the screen manipulating the surface using the two 3D trackers. Each hand has a distinct role to play, with the dominant hand being responsible for picking and manipulation, and the less-dominant hand being responsible for context setting of various kinds. Employing a user-centered design approach, we plan to develop new two-handed techniques for designing surfaces and for displaying surface properties using specialized textures rendered on the surface. Our approach to surface editing is to warp the highlighted part of the surface using the 3D trackers, and this project seeks to develop new warp operators that are powerful and easy to use. We also plan to develop a new abstraction for warps that will allow warps to be re-done and adjusted after they have been completed. We plan to apply this work to the domain of pediatric cardiac surgery planning. In this domain, surgeons reroute blood flow in patients whose hearts have only a single ventricle. We are working with researchers who evaluate the flow efficiency of the rerouting surgery using fluid dynamics simulations. These researchers are using our free-form surface editor to aid understanding of the current blood vessel shape, and to edit the shape in hopes of finding a more efficient configuration.