ARPen: Mid-Air Interactions 2.1

The ARPen application offers an innovative platform for mid-air drawing, leveraging marker tracking technology to enable users to create and position lines within a three-dimensional space. This capability facilitates intuitive interaction with digital sketches in a physical environment.

Testing this interaction requires only the printing of a designated marker, or alternatively, users can construct a custom Bluetooth-enabled pen using basic electronic components and accessible machinery available at local fabrication laboratories. Comprehensive instructions for building such a device can be found at http://hci.ac/arpen-ios.

Features of the application include:

• Freehand drawing in mid-air
• Creation of simple geometric shapes such as cubes
• Generation of complex geometries through techniques like sweeps, lofts, revolutions, and combination operations such as merge and intersect
• Manipulation of objects with moving, rotating, and scaling functions embedded within the mid-air environment
• Implementation of diverse menu interactions to enhance user experience
• Depth visualization methods to accurately represent the spatial relation of the pen tip relative to other scene elements
• Export capabilities for sketches or models in *.STL format suitable for further processing or 3D printing

This application is developed as part of the Personal Photonics project, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under their Open Photonics initiative. Further information is available at https://hci.rwth-aachen.de/arpen.