Sketching in the air: A vision-based system for 3D object design

3D object design has many applications including flexible 3D sketch input in CAD, computer game, webpage content design, image based object modeling, and 3D object retrieval. Most current 3D object design tools work on a 2D drawing plane such as computer screen or tablet, which is often inflexible with one dimension lost. On the other hand, virtual reality based methods have the drawbacks that there are awkward devices worn by the user and the virtual environment systems are expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based approach to 3D object design. Our system consists of a PC, a camera, and a mirror. We use the camera and mirror to track a wand so that the user can design 3D objects by sketching in 3D free space directly with out having to wear any cumbersome devices. A number of new techniques are developed for working in this system, including input of object wireframes, gestures for editing and drawing objects, and optimization-based planar and curved surface generation. Our system provides designers a new user interface for designing 3D objects conveniently.