Canal-U

Towards the Expressive Design of Virtual Worlds: Combining Knowledge and Control

Despite our great expressive skills, we humans lack an easy way of conveying the 3D worlds we imagine. While impressive advances were made in the last fifteen years to evolve digital modeling systems into gesture-based interfaces enabling to sketch or sculpt in 3D, modeling is still generally limited to the design of isolated, static shapes. In contrast, virtual worlds are composed of distributions or assemblies of elements which are too numerous to be created or even positioned one by one; the shapes of these elements may heavily depend on physical laws and on the interaction with their surroundings; and many of them may be animated, meaning that they should not only be designed in space, but also over time. In this talk, I will explore the recent extensions of expressive modeling metaphors such as sketching, painting, transfer and sculpting, to such complex cases. I will show that models for shape and motion need to be redefined from a user-centered perspective, and in particular embed the necessary knowledge to make them respond in an intuitive way to the user’s control gestures.