🏆 KAIST Research Highlight 2018

Agile 3D Sketching with Air Scaffolding

Yongkwan Kim

Sang-Gyun An

Joon Hyub Lee

Seok-Hyung Bae

KAIST 2019 Annual R&D Report

KAIST Research Highlight of 2018

Every individual has probably dreamed of sketches popping out of a piece of paper and becoming real. This is a joyful dream for most people, but it is a dire necessity for field designers. “3D sketching” is a technique that fills in the “missing link” between the 2D drawings and 3D shapes. Designers can use 3D sketching to “directly draw” a 3D shape as if using a pen and paper, without using complex 3D CAD modeling software. Professor Seok-Hyung Bae’s team at the Department of Industrial Design developed a novel 3D sketching technique called “air scaffolding,” in which designers quickly express 3D shapes by using their sense of space and natural hand motions to use them as “3D rough sketches.” This study, titled “Agile 3D sketching with air scaffolding,” won the Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2018, one of the most prestigious and the largest academic conference in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). It was ranked among the top 1% of all submissions (over 2,500) to the conference. In addition to enhancing the applicability of 3D sketching to design practice, the new technology developed by Professor Bae’s team is expected to usher in an era where all of us can easily express and share ideas in 3D, and it will further contribute to more rapid and flexible manufacturing innovations by being combined with smart production technology such as 3D printing.