This Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) Phase I project demonstrates the feasibility of a sketching system that bridges traditional drawing and three-dimensional modeling, offering a novel way to develop, explore and share visual ideas in 3-D. Using a fusion of hand-drawn strokes and captured imagery that can replicate the spatial and geometrical relationships found in the real world, these scenes are developed in 3-D at a speed and flexibility impossible with existing technology. The success and widespread adoption of the technology depends on the creation of a compelling and intuitive user experience. In order to confirm feasibility and bring the new platform to the market, the primary objective of this project is to complete the development of a tablet-based version of the system. The proposed research necessary to achieve this goal includes four interrelated parts: capture and exploration of exterior scenes, development of a user interface tailored to the new sketch paradigm, expansion of the sketching system to leverage data captured dynamically in situ, and a thorough evaluation of the user experience.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to develop technology that will directly impact creative design as practiced by professionals (e.g., architects, film makers, engineers, artists) by offering a new platform for creating and editing 3-D scenes, and will also impact the communication of ideas, where D representations predominate. In today's market place, the competitive position of many firms is often determined by their ability to rapidly design products, generate concepts, and evaluate new solutions. Moreover, over 70% of design costs are committed during the conceptual design phase. This technology has the potential to markedly speed this phase while qualitatively improving the development of these ideas. 3-D printing technology presents another application for this technology, whose commercialization (even to home users) has increased the demand for CAD software by hobbyists, independent inventors, and small businesses. The technology developed through this project will seize on this market opportunity and will also generate other business opportunities in software authoring tools, direct content creation, and consulting services. The core technology will also have applications in areas of cultural heritage, consumer marketing, and advertising.
Mental Canvas is developing a new form of graphical media and an authoring tool to generate that media. During the Phase I Project, Mental Canvas developed a tablet-based authoring package. The research efforts focused on the development of a natural, unique and coherent interface. Transforming an early research prototype into a tablet-based application posed many challenges. In particular, we needed to refefine the traditional "Windows, Icons, Mice, and Pointing" (WIMP) based 3D navigation and senor-rich multitouch interfaces to the tablet platform. Creating a 3D authoring interface presents a number of non-obvious challenges with regard to scene navigation and composition when compared to traditional graphics applications. We have worked closely with test users from different potential customer groups, including architects, professional illustratiors, sketch artists, publishers and advertising firms, to develop a natrural and intuitive interface. We invented novel ways to overload multi-touch gestures for different operations while mainating intuitiveness and consistency. We combined the tablet's internal sensor inputs, invented new graphical widgets and proposed new concepts and approaches for spatial layout and composition. We not only overcame the lack of a mouse, its buttons and a keyboard, but created a user interface experience that our testers prefer over those available in classical desktop drawing and CAD packages. Mental Canvas has enabled many interesting new applications in design, advertising and publishing. Our key innovataions in drawing, reprojection, 3D navigation, and insitu sketching have enabled a broad community of users to become content creators instead of consumers. Each of these activities has met significant research and development milestones.
