AiRSculpt: A Wearable AR 3D Sculpting System

2014 | Collaboration with Hyung-Il Kim / SK Creative Challenge Finalist

The AiRSculpt project was borne out of the search for a more intuitive means of creating 3D virtual content, and the desire to directly manipulate this content using our bare hands, just like a lump of clay. AiRSculpt brings together in one portable system the immediacy of freeform sketching and gesticulating in the air with the creative process of molding material into sculptural form. The motivation is to create more satisfying experiences of sculptural exploration and creation within the users’ own surroundings.

In AiRSculpt, as opposed to VR-based systems, users could quickly create and manipulate 3D virtual content directly with their bare hands in a real-world setting, and use both hands simultaneously in tandem or as separate tools to sculpt and manipulate their virtual creations. Our system uses a head-mounted display and a RGB-D head-mounted camera to detect the 3D location of hands and fingertips then render virtual content in calibration with real-world coordinates. Research prototype was exhibited in various venues and evaluation results presented in HCII2014.

S. Jang, H. Kim, W. Woo, and G. Wakefield, "AiRSculpt: A Wearable Augmented Reality 3D Sculpting System," In International Conference on Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions (DAPI 2014), Lectures on Computer Science (LNCS), Vol. 8530, pp. 130-141, Jun. 2014. [PDF]