Before the rise of the personal computer as a universal work station in the 1990s, animations and visual effects for movies and television were generally created with physical media such as clay or miniatures and puppets which were hand-crafted. To create the illusion of life and motion, these were then moved by hand while taking pictures at certain poses (Stop-Motion Animation). With the success of early computer generated visual effects such as used in the film Jurassic Park, and computer generated 3D animation movies such as Toy Story the PC gradually began to replace various physical media for production, with the effect that now more extensive and realistic effects have become not only possible but widely available to even smaller productions. The User Interfaces (UI) have not changed much since, with the great majority of artists using a mouse, keyboard, and 2D computer screen to create and control virtual 3D worlds. Alternative input devices have repeatedly been introduced, but not widely adopted by artists.
With the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology in recent years, a new venue has been opened to provide more intuitive and efficient work environments for creating 3D designs and animations: immersive 3D user interfaces (UIs) allow the user to enter into a three dimensional work environment that engulfs him, instead of just looking at a flat PC workstation screen in front of him. This allows for a more natural way of interaction, because the user no longer has to generate a mental representation of the virtual world from the limited information on the computer screen, but can actually experience his creation directly and interact with it as naturally as with the physical world.
Just recently, AR and VR technologies have entered the mass market, causing rising interest in the creative possibilities of immersive 3D UIs. However, most research in the area has been conducted with hardware that is outdated by todays standards and is possibly no longer applicable. In order to bridge the gap between research prototypes and real-world adoption, application-oriented research is required.
In this work I present my ongoing research efforts focusing on the various factors and problems of immersive 3D user interfaces for 3D design as well as reflect on experiences from creating a prototype 3D user interface aimed at professional artists. Over the course of my research I have performed an analysis of the current work situation of 3D artists (both through a survey and through individual observation and analysis of the workflow), have attempted to identify and classify the factors of 3D UIs as they are relevant for professional adoption at the time of this writing, and have performed two user studies in order to find quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors. Over the course of this research work, I have developed a 3D UI aimed at professional 3D designers which I eventually released to the public, which can be seen as the ultimate experiment to validate the prior research efforts. In this thesis I offer insights that I gained from the process of 3D design professionals adopting this experimental user interface.