Creative 3D Form-Making in Visual Art and Visual Design for Science

This paper presents the view that computer tools to support creative 3D modeling practice in art and visual design may benefit significantly from utilizing spatial 3D input captured from our hands. Traditionally, real-world applications have made only limited use of this style of input because it can be difficult to control. Recent interface advances have be-gun to overcome this limitation, allowing artists and visual designers to explore free-form 3D input from the hands as a creative tool for modeling challenging organic subjects, exploring new styles of representation of form, and proto-typing complex visual ideas in collaboration with scientists. Several of these developments are reviewed within this pa-per. We believe this style of input shows great promise for creativity support tools, in part because the immediacy and physicality of it relates so well to traditional techniques, such as sketching, that are critical in almost all visual design pro-cesses. We raise the question of how to best combine the rich, free-form input that is possible to capture from our hands with algorithms that interpret the input relative to mod-eling constraints or scientific data. We hope to engage both artists and computer researchers in a discussion of how rich, descriptive human movements may be input to the computer and combined with data-driven algorithms to support new creative processes. Author Keywords Free-form modeling, 3D user interfaces, artistic interfaces