SBIR Phase I: Sketch-based interaction for designing for laser cutters

敏捷制造中基于草图的交互创新大大降低了新手工程师和设计师的入门门槛。 低成本的快速原型硬件--3D打印机和激光切割机--提供了巨大的教育潜力，使学生能够亲自设计、设计和制造复杂的工件。 只有当学生拥有便于这种探索的建模工具时，这种潜力才能实现。 不幸的是，目前的设计软件很难学习和使用，其图形界面和功能集不适合探索性原型。 这些问题造成了一个障碍：面对令人困惑的界面，许多学生错误地“学习”工程设计超出了他们的能力。 这种新颖的交互模式旨在通过允许学习者快速准确地绘制他们想要制作的东西来消除这一障碍。 Sketch It，Make It软件将提供一个类似纸张的界面，设计师可以在其中创建CAD图纸，同时保留徒手草图的创意和认知优势。 在平板电脑中结合草图识别和约束管理，手绘可以为数字制造提供强大的无缝接口。这个项目将决定平板电脑是否能支持徒手绘图界面，以及它是否支持学生的制作项目;它将开发一个基于草图的设计工具的架构。更广泛的/商业影响：快速制作市场--激光切割机和3D打印机--在正规和非正规教育中都在迅速增长。 随着学校、晶圆厂实验室和个人最终获得硬件，学生和其他用户将发现操作这台机器的软件既笨拙又复杂。 拟议的软件工具解决了客户的关键需求：使设计更容易快速制造。 更一般地说，所提出的创新交互范例在人们绘制草图或制作图表的任何领域的商业软件中具有广泛的应用。 快速制造让学生有机会通过实践来学习设计。让所有人都能接触到设计，使公民能够在设计他们的世界中发挥积极作用。 通过避开标准CAD工具施加的障碍，Sketch It，Make It使学生能够设计和制作他们无法制作的东西。 学生们学习到工程设计和制造是有趣的，有用的，而且（最重要的）他们可以做到这一点。潜在的创新-将识别与约束管理相结合-如果被广泛采用，可以改变人机交互。 经过30年的鼠标驱动界面，平板电脑需要新的交互形式。通过Sketch It，Make It，我们可以学会以不同的方式思考与计算机的交互。

The innovation of sketch-based interaction for agile manufacturing substantially lowers the barrier to entry for novice engineers and designers. Low-cost rapid prototyping hardware -- 3-D printers and laser cutters -- offers tremendous educational potential, enabling students to personally design, engineer, and build complex artifacts. This potential can only be realized if students have modeling tools that facilitate such exploration. Unfortunately current design software is hard to learn and use and its graphical interface and feature set is poorly suited to exploratory prototyping. These problems impose a barrier: faced with baffling interfaces many students wrongly "learn" that engineering design is beyond their capabilities. This novel interaction paradigm aims to remove this barrier by allowing learners to sketch what they want to make, quickly and precisely. The Sketch It, Make It software will provide a paper-like interface where designers create CAD drawings while retaining the creative and cognitive advantages of freehand sketching. Combining sketch recognition and constraint management in a tablet computer, freehand drawing could provide a powerful, seamless interface to digital fabrication. This project will determine whether a tablet computer can support a freehand drawing interface and whether it supports student fabrication projects; and it will develop an architecture for sketch-based design tools.The broader/commercial impact: The market for rapid fabrication -- laser cutters and 3-D printers -- is growing rapidly in both formal and informal education. As schools, fab labs and eventually individuals acquire hardware, students and other users will find that the software to operate this machinery is unwieldy and complicated. The proposed software tools address a critical customer need: make it easy to design for rapid fabrication. More generally, the proposed innovative interaction paradigm has broad application in commercial software in any domain where people sketch or make diagrams. Rapid fabrication gives students opportunities to learn design by doing it. Making design accessible to all empowers citizens to play active roles in engineering their world. By sidestepping barriers that standard CAD tools impose, Sketch It, Make It enables students to design and make things they otherwise could not have made. Students learn that engineering design and fabrication is fun, useful, and (most importantly) that they can do it. The underlying innovation --integrating recognition with constraint management -- if widely adopted, can transform human-computer interaction. After thirty years of mouse-driven interfaces, tablet computers demand new forms of interaction. Through Sketch It, Make It we may learn to think differently about interacting with computers.