A Scaffold-Based Tool for Product Design Variations in Virtual Reality

Product design is an iterative process involving several kinds of drawing techniques. Analytic drawing, which involves the use of guidelines or scaffolds to draw the object’s shape curves, aids in achieving precision and accuracy. Freehand drawing allows designers to add details without guidance. The set of scaffold, shape, and detail curves are heavily interrelated. As a result, once a draft set of curves is completed, modifications are extremely difficult. This impedes iterative exploration. We propose to use scaffold manipulation in virtual reality to assist designers in exploring and modifying their product designs. Our key insight is that the same scaffolds designers create for analytic drawing provide an intuitive set of handles. Given a scaffolded 3D product sketch as input, our VR-based system allows designers to directly manipulate the scaffold lines and add detail strokes in any order. Whenever scaffold lines are edited, our system solves for a scaffold line configuration that preserves inter-scaffold relationships. The shape and detail curves are then deformed to match the new scaffold lines. This allows exploratory product design in which a simple template scaffolded 3D drawing is modified and detailed—and further modified—to create a variety of designs. We validated our approach with professional product designers.