CustomizAR: Facilitating Interactive Exploration and Measurement of Adaptive 3D Designs

Abstract

Online 3D model repositories such as Thingiverse ofer millions of open source designs that are shared for reuse and remix. Many of the designs are customizable to adapt to real-world objects upon personal needs of varying tasks and physical dimensions. However, it is challenging for novices to discover such designs using textbased search queries, comprehend what each parameter means for customization, locate these parameters on the target objects for measurement, and conduct measurements correctly. These challenges may cause the designs to be incorrectly adjusted, thus failing to function as expected and requiring users to start over, which costs additional time and material. We present CustomizAR, a pipeline for facilitating the interactive exploration of adaptive designs and the measurement of real-world constraints to fabricate them correctly. CustomizAR supports the search and discovery of adaptive 3D designs using an object-centric graph-based data structure, and guides users through an interactive measurement process leveraging computer vision techniques. Our technical evaluations and user studies demonstrate that CustomizAR facilitates efective discovery, adjustment, and reuse of adaptive designs that are shared online.

pARam: Leveraging Parametric Design in Extended Reality to Support the Personalization of Artifacts for Personal Fabrication

“…Search and retrieval of models for fabrication has also been discussed in previous works focusing on previewing and remixing [108] or query formulation [109] in-situ. CustomizAR by Liang et al is a tool to explore customizable designs on Thingiverse, which further supported users with a tablet-based measurement functionality [68]. The work is closely related to our work and pARam.…”

“…Liang et al support the measurement of relevant dimensions but also the exploration of designs and further evaluate their camera-based measurement approach, confirming that it may provide sufficient precision. The authors further outlined how using established measurement tools may not prevent errors [68], as measuring is a skill in and of its own [94]. We aim to further explore and augment in-situ interactions with parametric designs, for instance, by providing recommendations and early validations.…”

“…As with the other configurators, there are options to choose a base type (e.g., cuff, ring), or a material, and a direct display of the price is shown. In the space of personal fabrication, Thingiverse offers a rich selection of customizable designs [68,87] that are based on openSCAD. An example of such a design is "Stretchy Bracelet" by emmett 9 from 2011, which is among the most commonly made designs on Thingiverse.…”

“…The means for personal fabrication empower endusers to create unique artifacts following their requirements and express themselves in a physical, tangible medium. Two contrasting approaches to designing for fabrication exist: a) modeling, where users define most, if not all, details of a design [107]; and b) retrieval, where users search for finished models [4,107] in repositories like Printables or Thingiverse, which provide access to crowd-sourced designs [68]. However, both approaches have their shortcomings.…”

“…In the context of digital media [82], creative programming [40] but also in personal fabrication [87], remixing allows creative practitioners to benefit from collaborative effort and avoid "starting from scratch" [107]. For personal fabrication, remixing is facilitated through interfaces to parametric designs: "customizers" [68]. This is particularly visible across model repositories like Thingiverse 1 [87], where the presence of these easy-to-use interfaces to create adapted designs (remixes) sparked an increase of contributions [28].…”