Towards a natural interaction for rapid prototyping of parametric closets

Custom closets customers usually lack the expertise to design their desired closet. The use of a software tool that incorporates the design expertise might allow them to sketch their ideas without third party oversight. While architecture related applications are very powerful and make it possible to have an accurate graphical representation of real world, these Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools demand high technical training and their use in the engineering field is generic. Our work, framed within the development of a rapid prototyping tool of custom closets called Sketch Arm, introduces an interaction proposal that seeks to minimize the time and complexity associated with typical operations in CAD. Supported by multi-touch capabilities of today´s mobile devices, our system allows users to manipulate the closet structure directly in real time by using a minimalist graphical user interface (GUI) together with a touch interface based on easily recognizable gesture patterns. Direct on-screen data manipulation is very attractive to the end-user in general and highly beneficial for novice IT users in particular while gesture-based interaction is extremely intuitive for performing artistic tasks. Throughout the article, we will describe in depth the designed interaction system and we will present the original solutions we made to common problems in touch systems like accuracy and occlusion.