Digital Foam is a new input sensor developed to support clay like sculpting and modeling operations. We present techniques facilitating navigation and manipulation operations performed using Spherical Digital Foam as a sole input device. Our free-form sculpting technique allows manipulation of new and existing 3D models using accumulated sculpting like motions. Digital Foam’s multi-point pressure sensitive surface captures the separate locations of a user’s fingertips allowing controlled manipulation of multiple model vertices simultaneously. Additionally, we developed a technique that allows the camera view and zoom to be controlled by applying varying pressure to the Digital Foam surface. Furthermore, we have designed a menu system tailored for operation using Spherical Digital Foam as a sole input device using both the internal orientation sensor and the pressure sensitive surface.

References

Ross T. Smith, Bruce H. Thomas, and Wayne Piekarski. 2008. Digital foam interaction techniques for 3D modeling. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology (VRST ’08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1450579.1450592

R. T. Smith, B. H. .. Thomas and W. Piekarski, “Tech Note: Digital Foam,” 2008 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces, Reno, NE, 2008, pp. 35-38. DOI: 10.1109/3DUI.2008.4476588