HOT: Hold your own tools for AR-based constructive art

Using digital instruments to support artistic expression and creativity is a hot topic. In this work, we focused on the design of a suitable interface for Augmented Reality-based constructive art on handheld devices. Issues to be faced encompassed how to give artists sense of spatial dimensions, how to provide them with different tools for realizing artworks, and how much moving away from ``the real'' and going towards ``the virtual''. Through a touch-capable device, such as a smartphone or a tablet, we offer artists a clean workspace, where they can decide when to introduce artworks and tools. In fact, besides exploiting the multi-touch functionality and the gyroscopes/accelerometers to manipulate artworks in six degrees of freedom (6DOF), the proposed solution exploits a set of printed markers that can be brought into the camera's field of view to make specific virtual tools appear in the augmented scene. With such tools, artists can decide to control, e.g., manipulation speed, scale factor, scene parameters, etc., thus complementing functionalities that can be accessed via the device's screen