Magic canvas: interactive design of a 3-D scene prototype from freehand sketches

Abstract

Construction of a 3-D scene consisting of multiple objects can be tedious work. Existing 3-D editing tools require the user to choose an appropriate model in a database first and then carefully place it in the scene at a desired position combining various operations such as translation, rotation, and scaling. To simplify the process, we propose a system that takes simple 2D sketches of models in a scene as input for 3D scene construction. The system then automatically identifies corresponding models in a database and puts them in the appropriate location and posture so that their appearance matches the user's input sketches. The system combines a 3-D model search and a 3-D posture estimation to obtain the result. This system allows the user to construct a prototype of a 3-D scene quickly and intuitively. We conducted a user study to compare our interface with traditional menu-based UI and verified that our system was useful for constructing a 3-D scene prototype, especially for facilitating the exploration of various alternative designs. We expect our system to be useful as a prototyping tool for 3-D scene construction in various application areas such as interior design, communication, education, and entertainment.