We propose Neural Canvas, a lightweight 3D platform that integrates sketching and a collection of generative AI models to facilitate scenic design prototyping. Compared with traditional 3D tools, sketching in a 3D environment helps designers quickly express spatial ideas, but it does not facilitate the rapid prototyping of scene appearance or atmosphere. Neural Canvas integrates generative AI models into a 3D sketching interface and incorporates four types of projection operations to facilitate 2D-to-3D content creation. Our user study shows that Neural Canvas is an effective creativity support tool, enabling users to rapidly explore visual ideas and iterate 3D scenic designs. It also expedites the creative process for both novices and artists who wish to leverage generative AI technology, resulting in attractive and detailed 3D designs created more efficiently than using traditional modeling tools or individual generative AI platforms.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642096
In our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions and codes by systematically reviewing 115 papers while leveraging the expertise of researchers in various disciplines. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the design of new writing assistants.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642697
Various modalities have emerged in the field of 3D generative AI (GenAI) to enhance design outcomes. While some designers find inspiration in prompts to guide their design options, others prefer sketching to embody creative visions. Nonetheless, the impact of the different modalities of 3D GenAI on the design process remains largely unexplored. This study examines the utilization of prompt- and sketch-guided modalities within the design process by conducting linkography and workflow analyses with 12 designers. The results revealed that prompts played a pivotal role in stimulating initial ideation, whereas sketches played a crucial role in embodying design ideas. This investigation highlights the distinct contributions of these modalities at different phases of the design process, suggesting the potential for a more refined and synergistic collaboration between humans and AI. By elucidating the diverse functions of sketches and prompts, we propose prospective directions for the UX framework of the 3D GenAI.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642218
Graphic designers often get inspiration through the recombination of references. Our formative study (N=6) reveals that graphic designers focus on conceptual keywords during this process, and want support for discovering the keywords, expanding them, and exploring diverse recombination options of them, while still having room for designers' creativity. We propose CreativeConnect, a system with generative AI pipelines that helps users discover useful elements from the reference image using keywords, recommends relevant keywords, generates diverse recombination options with user-selected keywords, and shows recombinations as sketches with text descriptions. Our user study (N=16) showed that CreativeConnect helped users discover keywords from the reference and generate multiple ideas based on them, ultimately helping users produce more design ideas with higher self-reported creativity compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was shown effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642794