WireDraw: 3D Wire Sculpturing Guided with Mixed Reality

Abstract

The availability of commodity 3D extruder pen allows direct drawing of 3D wire sculptures for novice users, enabling many novel applications such as intuitive spatial intelligence development for school students. However, the lack of spatial and structural cues among individual pen strokes makes the 3D drawing process challenging, which often leads to highly distorted and even incomplete wire sculptures. We present a mixed reality system, called `WireDraw', to immersively guide the 3D drawing for easy wire sculpturing. The system design is based on novel 3D drawing principles and the subsequent optimization, making the stroke sequence of the wire model drawable and easy to draw. On-the-fly edits on unsatisfactory strokes are also allowed for creative design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by testing on a variety of wire models and a user study. The results show that the visual guidance provided by our system is extremely helpful for drawing high-quality wire sculptures.