A Tangible Surface for Digital Sculpting in Virtual Environments

With the growth of virtual reality setups, digital sculpting tools become more and more immersive. It is now possible to create a piece of art within a virtual environment, directly with the controllers. However, these devices do not allow to touch the virtual material as a sculptor would do. To tackle this issue we investigate in this paper the use of a tangible surface that could be used in virtual reality setups. We designed a low-cost prototype composed of two layers of sensors in order to measure a wide range of pressure. We also propose two mapping techniques to fit our device to a virtual 3D mesh to be sculpted. Participants of an informal test were asked to reproduce a pattern on three meshes: a plane, a sphere and a teapot. They succeeded in this task, showing the potential of our approach.