Towards Augmented Reality User Interfaces in 3D Media Production

Figure 1: Our goal is to establish Augmented Reality as a user interface for professional media production. Our approach consists of three steps: We conducted an online survey with 3D media professionals from all around the world (a). Based on their responses, we derived requirements and designed a user interface (b). We then implemented a prototype (c) and evaluated it with media professionals in a pilot study. The idea of using Augmented Reality (AR) user interfaces (UIs) to create 3D media content, such as 3D models for movies and games has been repeatedly suggested over the last decade. Even though the concept is intuitively compelling and recent technological ad-vances have made such an application increasingly feasible, very little progress has been made towards an actual real-world appli-cation of AR in professional media production. To this day, no immersive 3D UI has been commonly used by professionals for 3D computer graphics (CG) content creation. In this paper, we are first to publish a requirements analysis for our target application in the professional domain. Based on a survey that we conducted with media professionals, the analysis of profes-sional 3D CG software, and professional training tutorials, we iden-tify these requirements and put them into the context of AR UIs. From these findings, we derive several interaction design principles that aim to address the challenges of real-world application of AR to the production pipeline. We implemented these in our own pro-totype system while receiving feedback from media professionals. The insights gained in the survey, requirements analysis, and user interface design are relevant for research and development aimed at creating production methods for 3D media production