the-midnight-paper

MixFab: a mixed-reality environment for personal fabrication

Authors: Christian Weichel, Manfred Lau, David Kim, Nicolas Villar, Hans Gellersen

Conference: CHI ‘14 Toronto, Ontario Canada

Keywords: personal fabrication; direct manipulation; 3D printing;

mixed-reality; 3D modeling

Strength

I like the design simplicity of MixFab and the way it integrates physical objects into the 3D modeling design process. The joy of seeing an object being 3D printed often gets shadowed by the pain that comes from modeling the object at the first place. With MixFab, users can not only use direct and natural interactions to design virtual artificats, but also use 3D scanned object as a base.

Weakness

MixFab does not support any specific gesture for object assembly. Symbolizing union and difference of meshes with a plus and a minus sign is not as intuitive as directly manipulating an object.

Future Work

I would like to extend MixFab by creating gesture based fusing and subtraction of shapes to support object assembly. A scoop gesture can be performed to cut out a semi-spherical structure and circular gesture followed by extrusion can be used to cut out a cylinder.