Woodworkers have to navigate multiple considerations when planning a project, including available resources, skill-level, and intended effort. Do it yourself (DIY) woodworkers face these challenges most acutely because of tight material constraints and a desire for custom designs tailored to specific spaces. To address these needs, we present XR-penter, an extended reality (XR) application that supports in situ, material-aware woodworking for casual makers. Our system enables users to design virtual scrap wood assemblies directly in their workspace, encouraging sustainable practices through the use of discarded materials. Users register physical material as virtual twins, manipulate these twins into an assembly in XR (while receiving feedback on material usage and alignment with their surroundings), and preview cuts needed for fabrication. We conducted a case study and feedback sessions demonstrating that XR-penter supports improvisational workflows in practice, and found that woodworkers who prioritize material-driven and adaptive workflows would benefit most from our system.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713331
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)