Section: Research Program

Methodology

As already stressed, thinking of future digital modeling technologies as an Expressive Virtual Pen enabling to seamlessly design, refine and convey animated 3D content, leads to revisit models for shapes, motions and stories from a user-centered perspective. More specifically, inspiring from the user-centered interfaces developed in the Human Computer Interaction domain, we introduced the new concept of user-centered graphical models. Ideally, such models should be designed to behave, under any user action, the way a human user would have predicted. In our case, user's actions may include creation gestures such as sketching to draft a shape or direct a motion, deformation gestures such as stretching a shape in space or a motion in time, or copy-paste gestures to transfer some of the features from existing models to other ones. User-centered graphical models need to incorporate knowledge in order to seamlessly generate the appropriate content from such actions. We are using the following methodology to advance towards these goals:

• Develop high-level models for shapes, motion and stories that embed the necessary knowledge to respond as expected to user actions. These models should provide the appropriate handles for conveying the user's intent while embedding procedural methods that seamlessly take care of the appropriate details and constraints.

• Combine these models with expressive design and control tools such as gesture-based control through sketching, sculpting, or acting, towards interactive environments where users can create a new virtual scene, play with it, edit or refine it, and semi-automatically convey it through a video.