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

Comments
Pape Youm - http://436chi-lounge.blogspot.com/2011/02/paper-reading-9-everybodylovessketch-3d.html
Alyssa Nabors - http://csce436-nabors.blogspot.com/2011/02/reading-9-improved-window-switching.html

Reference Information
Title: EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience
Authors: Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan, Karan Singh
Presentation Venue: UIST 2010: 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology; October 4-7, 2009; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
This paper is about several researchers’ effort to develop a tool that helps untrained people practice and perfect their drawing skills through a 3D curve sketching system called EverybodyLovesSketch.

The paper gives a system overview in which the researchers explain the different curves and sketch surfaces in detail. They then present a user study in which 49 high school students used EverybodyLovesSketch in a 75 minute design class for 11 days. They broke the students into three groups with one group doing freeform architectural design, another car design and the last doing whatever they like including drawing cartoon characters.

Their results proved that the system is highly learnable. They found that 78% of the students doing architectural design and 90% of the students drawing the car had completed meaningful 3D models within the first two days. The third group, drawing cartoons, were found to be slightly slower because they started out by drawing 2D characters.

By the last day of the study 47 out of 49 students had successfully created 3D objects. The study also suggested that the program improved the students’ spatial and perspective drawing skills, but they believe more studies are needed to further evaluate this potential benefit.

Student drawings taken from the paper

Discussion
Though I felt a little bogged down in the middle of the paper when they were describing the more technical aspects of the system, this paper was very interesting and I was glad to see a rather in-depth user study performed. I was once really into drawing, but as the authors describe in the paper, I felt I had reached my highest potential and that it just wasn’t very good so I gave it up. Maybe having a system like this would have kept me motivated.

They mention more studies need to be done to better evaluate certain things like the potential for this system to improve one’s drawing skills on paper. They also discuss how a certain feature was rated low because the students didn’t use it and it would occasionally turn on when they meant to do something else. After fixing bugs such as these, I think they could do several more user studies to improve their system and explore the benefits to the system.