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Text-to-image AI systems are capable of generating novel images for inspiration, but their applications for 3D design workflows and how designers can build 3D models using AI-provided inspiration is less understood. To investigate this, we integrated DALL-E, GPT-3, and CLIP within a CAD software in 3DALL-E, a plugin that allows users to construct text and image prompts based on what they are modelling. In a study with 13 designers, we found that designers saw great potential to incorporate 3DALL-E into their workflows and to use text-to-image AI for reference images, renders, materials, and design considerations. Additionally, we elaborate on prompting patterns and provide measures of prompt complexity observed across participants. We conclude on a discussion of how 3DALL-E can merge with existing generative design workflows and propose prompt bibliographies as a form of human-AI design history.

In creating SkyGlyphs, our goal was to develop a data visualization that could possibly capture people's attention and spark their curiosity to explore a dataset. This work was inspired by a mingling of research including serendipitous interactions, visualizations for public displays, and personal visualizations. SkyGlyphs is a nonconventional whimsical visualization, depicting datapoints as animated balloons in space. We designed it to encourage non-experts to casually browse the contents of a repository through visual interactions like linking and grouping of datapoints. Our contributions include SkyGlyphs' representation and our design reflection that reveals a perspective on how to design delightful visualizations., Comment: Accepted to IEEE VIS Arts Program 2022

Step-by-step tutorials have emerged as a key means for learning complex software, but they are typically designed for individuals learning independently. In contrast, cooperative learning, where learners can help each other as they work, is a fundamental pedagogical technique with many established benefits. To extend these benefits to learning 3D-design software, this work investigates the design of remote cooperative software tutorial systems. We first conduct an observational study of pairs of participants working on 3D-design tutorials, which reveals a range of potential benefits, challenges, and strategies for cooperation. Our findings inform the design of TwoTorials, a cooperative stepby-step tutorial system that helps pairs of remote users establish shared 3D context, maintain awareness of each other's activities, and coordinate their efforts. A user study reveals several benefits to this approach, including enhanced cooperation between learners, reduced effort and mental demand, increased awareness of peer activities, and higher subjective engagement with the tutorial.

We present Paper Forager, a web-based system which allows users to rapidly explore large collections of research documents. Our sample corpus uses 5,055 papers published at the ACM CHI and UIST conferences. Paper Forager provides a visually based browsing experience, allowing users to identify papers of interest based on their graphical appearance, in addition to providing traditional faceted search techniques. A cloud-based architecture stores the papers as multi-resolution images, giving users immediate access to reading individual pages of a paper, thus reducing the transaction cost between finding, scanning, and reading papers of interest. Initial user feedback sessions elicited positive subjective feedback, while a 24-month external deployment generated in-the-wild usage data which we analyze. Users of the system indicated that they would be enthusiastic to continue having access to the Paper Forager system in the future.

As VR technology becomes more available, VR applications will be increasingly used to present information visualizations. While data visualization in VR is an interesting topic, there remain questions about how effective or accurate such visualization can be. One known phenomenon with VR environments is that people tend to unconsciously compress or underestimate distances. However, it is unknown if or how this effect will alter the perception of data visualizations in VR. To this end, we replicate portions of Cleveland and McGill's foundational perceptual visualization studies, in VR. Through a series of three studies we find that distance compression does negatively affect estimations of actual lengths (heights of bars), but does not appear to impact relative comparisons. Additionally, by replicating the position-angle experiments, we find that (as with traditional 2D visualizations) people are better at relative length evaluations than relative angles. Finally, by looking at these open questions, we develop a series of best practices for performing data visualization in a VR environment.

We present MeetingMate, a system for improving meeting effectiveness and knowledge transfer within an organization. The system utilizes already existing content produced within the organization (slide decks, meeting information, HR databases, etc.) from which it generates and presents contextually relevant information in real-time to meeting participants through an ambient interface. Besides providing details about projects and content within the company, an employee relationship graph is created which supports increasing a user's "metaknowlege" about who knows what and who knows whom within the organization.

Augmented Reality (AR) can assist with physical tasks such as object assembly through the use of situated instructions. These instructions can be in the form of videos, pictures, text or guiding animations, where the most helpful media among these is highly dependent on both the user and the nature of the task. Our work supports the authoring of AR tutorials for assembly tasks with little overhead beyond simply performing the task itself. The presented system, AuthAR reduces the time and effort required to build interactive AR tutorials by automatically generating key components of the AR tutorial while the author is assembling the physical pieces. Further, the system guides authors through the process of adding videos, pictures, text and animations to the tutorial. This concurrent assembly and tutorial generation approach allows for authoring of portable tutorials that fit the preferences of different end users.

This paper introduces Workflow graphs, or W-graphs, which encode how the approaches taken by multiple users performing a fixed 3D design task converge and diverge from one another. The graph's nodes represent equivalent intermediate task states across users, and directed edges represent how a user moved between these states, inferred from screen recording videos, command log data, and task content history. The result is a data structure that captures alternative methods for performing sub-tasks (e.g., modeling the legs of a chair) and alternative strategies of the overall task. As a case study, we describe and exemplify a computational pipeline for building W-graphs using screen recordings, command logs, and 3D model snapshots from an instrumented version of the Tinkercad 3D modeling application, and present graphs built for two sample tasks. We also illustrate how W-graphs can facilitate novel user interfaces with scenarios in workflow feedback, on-demand task guidance, and instructor dashboards.

Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2019, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 28 - 31 May 2019, Generative design techniques use algorithmic encodings of domain knowledge to automate parts of the design process. This approach has worked well when success can be written as an optimization problem, but useful evaluation criteria are often discovered during the design process. To study how these criteria are developed we built DreamRooms, a room layout prototyping tool with a tight interaction loop between the designer and a generative process that does not encode a priori objective measures of quality. DreamRooms consists of a VR environment wherein the user can set constraints and gradually lower the entropy of a generative process that produces alternative layouts for the user to consider and iterate on. In addition to the DreamRooms system, we present the results of an observational study which revealed benefits to rapid collaboration between a designer and the generative process in an embodied environment and points towards mechanisms for communicating design intent to the generative process.

Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2017, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 16-19 May 2017, 107 - 114, Smartwatches have the potential to enable quick micro-interactions throughout daily life. However, because they require both hands to operate, their full potential is constrained, particularly in situations where the user is actively performing a task with their hands. We investigate the space of no-handed interaction with smartwatches in scenarios where one or both hands are not free. Specifically, we present a taxonomy of scenarios in which standard touchscreen interaction with smartwatches is not possible, and discuss the key constraints that limit such interaction. We then implement a set of interaction techniques and evaluate them via two user studies: one where participants viewed video clips of the techniques and another where participants used the techniques in simulated hand-constrained scenarios. Our results found a preference for foot-based interaction and reveal novel design considerations to be mindful of when designing for no-handed smartwatch interaction scenarios.

A sketch-based interface within an animation engine provides an end-user with tools for creating emitter textures and oscillator textures. The end-user may create an emitter texture by sketching one or more patch elements and then sketching an emitter. The animation engine animates the sketch by generating a stream of patch elements that emanate from the emitter. The end-user may create an oscillator texture by sketching a patch that includes one or more patch elements, and then sketching a brush skeleton and an oscillation skeleton. The animation engine replicates the patch along the brush skeleton, and then interpolates the replicated patches between the brush skeleton and the oscillation skeleton, thereby causing those replicated patches to periodically oscillate between the two skeletons.