AniXDim: Integrating Cross-Dimensional Interaction into Desktop Character Animation Workflows

Immersive creation tools enhance spatial understanding, yet they push animators to abandon mature 2D desktop practices; Pure desktop setups, however, lack embodied spatial manipulation, making tool switching cognitively costly. To address this issue, We present AniXDim, a cross-dimensional interaction system for 3D character animation that unifies precise planar editing and embodied spatial control without explicit mode toggles. A commodity mouse is augmented for on-demand 6DoF manipulation, and a VR controller is endowed with high-precision planar input through adaptive projection, forming bidirectional dimensional augmentation. Users simply raise or rest the device to enable near-frictionless transitions, while a single autostereoscopic desktop display adapts depth to the inferred interaction state, supporting keyframe, pose, and reference authoring within one consistent workspace. A controlled user study comparing AniXDim with pure desktop and pure VR baselines indicates significant performance gains over the desktop baseline and comparable efficiency to the VR baseline, and higher usability ratings while maintaining comparable workload. These findings suggest that near-frictionless dimensional switching can reconcile 2D precision and 3D embodiment, offering a low-learning-overhead pathway for future hybrid desktop animation pipelines and broader 2D–3D authoring domains.