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。由于绘图是许多学科(例如，产品设计、建筑、工程、艺术)的创造性工作的基础，研究人员将重点放在3D绘图这一新兴媒介上，3D绘图是一种计算机辅助绘图形式，使用3D跟踪笔的扫动来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、工程师和其他人手中，虚拟现实3D绘图技术已经带来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，就像VR的其他许多早期应用一样，与传统绘图的实体、真实世界的对应产品相比仍然有限。例如，艺术家和产品设计师被教导画画的方式；在现实世界中学习绘画始于学习看，也就是对一个主题进行仔细的观察。对于高级抽屉来说，观察现实世界的绘画甚至是研究一门学科的一种方式，一种探究的方式。然而，虚拟环境中的创造性工作采取了相反的方法，用户拥有强大的工具和无穷无尽的3D画布，但无法将这些与他们的笔记、草图、模型、实验和其他现实世界的艺术品联系起来。该项目提出了3D绘图的新愿景，使其适用于与真实世界主题(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、为社会变革工作的艺术家)的有影响力的工作。关键的方法是将3D绘图和其他通常在虚拟环境中执行的创造性任务重新定位在仔细观察的基础技能上。具体地说，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，并使用这些观察来创建3D图形。这些基础工具的成功通过基于实验室的用户研究进行了评估。综合教育计划创建了大学课程和教材，以培训学生在这些新的跨现实工作模式中工作，并在潜在的3D绘图教师中建立能力，在AR中教授这种新风格的观察性3D绘图。计算机科学和艺术/设计学科的本科生都被培养成跨学科研究团队的关键成员。以前对3D绘图的研究使3D笔更具可控性，并导致了许多令人兴奋的软件工具，但这些工具都不能帮助人们跨越现实绘制他们所看到的东西。该项目创建了新颖的用户界面技术和视点熵算法，用于通过识别、可视化和导航对真实世界对象的观察最有用的视点来进行观察(例如，判断相对比例、角度和负空间)。它还开发了空间用户界面，通过2D+3D草图混合界面和基于计算机图形草图的3D建模算法，将观测转换为手绘3D形式。对真实世界观察的深度关注使拟议的技术成为跨现实用户界面新兴研究的理想范例，这些用户界面支持现实、虚拟和两者之间的混合空间之间的无缝转换。该项目包括一个紧密结合的教育计划，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基于实验室和课堂的用户研究相结合的方式进行评估。这项研究工作将打开使用3D绘图作为一种调查模式的大门，以利用绘图的表现力来代表我们周围的世界。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.