HoloSketch: A Virtual Reality Sketching / Animation Tool

Commented on the following blogs
Drew Logsdon
Franck Norman

Summary

HoloSketch is a tool, designed for nonprogrammers to create and manipulate images in 3D. It uses a 20 inch stereo CRT with 112.9 Hz refresh rate. A new viewing matrix is calculated separately for each eye. There is a 3D mouse with a digitizer rod, which is used to control many of the different functions in HoloSketch. The menu design in HoloSketch is engaged by pressing and holding the right wand button. The menu would then fade in. The user would select an item by poking the button and when the user releases the right wand button, the item would be selected. There are many features in HoloSketch that I would not discuss here.

According to the results, it was very easy for first time users to create complex 3D images. Most users however keep their head stationary so they don't look around the object they're creating. They also got a real artist to try to use it for a month. The artist started cold and did not get any documents to help her, but within a short time, complex objects were created with ease.

HoloSketch was designed to be a general purpose 3D sketching and simple animation system.

Commentary

This is a very interesting paper, considering it was made in 1995. I did not even think that 3D virtual imaging was around back then. I still wonder about some things in the paper. The author stated that CPU instructions that could be executed per graphics primitive rendered is steadily going down. I don't quite understand what this means. Does it mean that the CPU is being used to render graphics so it can't do something else? Also, the author did not give numbers on the results, like how many novices were in the trial, and the average time before completing a task. Also, did they give the user an instruction on what to create and they didn't define "simple creatures"