Paper Reading #9: EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience

Title:
EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience

Comments:
Keith Farinella
Adam Fridli

Reference:
Bae, S., Balakrishnan, R., Singh K.  EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience.  UIST '09. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622189/p59-bae.pdf?key1=1622189&key2=0861637921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=8482942&CFTOKEN=22626933

Summary:

This article discussed the performance of the 3D design software EverybodyLoveSketch which was based off of the ILoveSketch.  ILoveSketch is a program designed for professionals, but the researches wanted to develope a program that was more suitable for all audiences.  The basic concepts were taken from ILoveSketch and implemented in different ways in EverybodyLoveSketch.  To test their design, the researchers studied the interactions of 49 high school students who used the software for 11 days.

The article first looks at perspective drawing and studies the way professionals come about doing actual sketches.  They shadowed and interviewed a few in order to get an understanding of how it works.  They noticed that an important aspect of every designer were the idea of linear perspective, convergence, and measurement which all use lines that are not actually part of the drawing in order to make things as they actually are and not how we have mental models for them.

 After this study, they saw their design goals for EverybodyLovesSketch as follows:

• Easy 2D stroke drawing
• Easy 2D/3D navigation
• Easy scaffolding or sketch surface definition
• Dynamic visualization of a perspective scaffold
• Easy Syntax

They explain how scaffold lines and perspective measurements are often disregarded by novice users because they do not know the correct way to use or create them.  A major benefit of EverybodyLovesSketch according to the article is that the program automatically can figure these into the design.

The interaction with the sketch surface was fairly complex but able to do significant things fairly easily.  Ticks allow the creation of a plane based off of a curve.  the axis widget, a small lasso, allows for the rotation of a figure.  Surfaces can be defined using loops to define the edges of a surface.  In addition to this, the surfaces can be configured to have a grid overlay which aids in the recognition of the dimensions of the surface.

The user evaluation showed that 96% of the students were able to successfully create meaningful 3D objects.  The first few days were spent in instruction and after that the students were given projects to deign.  The students were split into three categories based upon their ability to sketch on paper.  At the end the students filled out a questionnaire which asked questions about the program.  The feedback was greatly positive.  Many students felt their 3D spacial understanding has improved because of the use of the program.  Based upon these results the authors looked at possible future corrections for this system.



Discussion:
This article was very detailed and good for the total feel of how the user interacted with the system.  It was difficult to get a feel for how it was in a short period of time however.  Skimming the article did not give a great synopses of what they were trying to accomplish.  It seems like their goal was to make this application easy for novice designers, and while these students do seem to be novice designers, they all had experience in many design programs which may have skewed the results on their ability to create objects.  Nonetheless I like the idea of bringing programs down to easy usability while keeping the functionality.