Interacting with digital contents in 3D is an essential task in various applications such as modeling packages, gaming, virtual reality, etc. Traditional interfaces using keyboard and mouse or trackball usually require a non-trivial amount of working space as well as a learning process. We present the design of EZ-Manipulator, a new 3D manipulation interface using smartphones that supports mobile, fast, and ambiguity-free interaction with 3D objects. Our system leverages the built-in multi-touch input and gyroscope sensor of smartphones to achieve 9 degrees-of-freedom axis-constrained manipulation and free-form rotation. Using EZ-Manipulator to manipulate objects in 3D is easy. The user merely has to perform intuitive single- or two-finger gestures and rotate the hand-held device to perform manipulations at fine-grained and coarse levels respectively. We further investigate the ambiguity in manipulation introduced by indirect manipulations using a multi-touch interface, and propose a dynamic virtual camera adjustment to effectively resolve the ambiguity. A preliminary study shows that our system has significant lower task completion time compared to conventional use of a keyboard–mouse interface, and provides a positive user experience to both novices and experts.

Line drawing is a style of image abstraction where the perceptual content of the image is conveyed using distinct straight or curved lines. However, extracting semantically salient lines is not trivial and mastered only by skilled artists. While many parametric filters have successfully extracted accurate and coherent lines, their results are sensitive to parameter choice and easily lead to either an excessive or insufficient number of lines. In this work, we present an interactive system to generate concise line abstractions of arbitrary images via a few user specified strokes. Specifically, the user simply has to provide a few intuitive strokes on the input images, including tracing roughly along edges and scribbling on the region of interest, through a sketching interface. The system then automatically extracts lines that are long, coherent and share similar textural structures to form a corresponding highly detailed line drawing. We have tested our system with a wide variety of images. Our experimental results show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of quality and efficiency.