Smart Motion Trails for Animating in VR

The artistic crafting of 3D animations by designers is a complex and iterative process. While classical animation tools have brought significant improvements in creating and manipulating shapes over time, most approaches rely on classical 2D input devices to create 3D contents. With the advent of virtual reality technologies and their ability to dive the users in their 3D worlds and to precisely track devices in 6 dimensions (position and orientation), a number of VR creative tools have emerged such as Quill, AnimVR, Tvori, Tiltbrush or MasterPieceVR. While these tools provide intuitive means to directly design in the 3D space by exploiting both the 6D tracking capacity of the hand devices and the stereoscopic perception by the user, the animation capacities or such tools remain strongly limited, and often reproduce classical 2D manipulators in VR. In this work, we propose the design of smart interactive manipulators which leverage on the specificity of VR to animate poly-articulated animations. We then perform a user study to evaluate the benefits of such manipulators over traditional 2D tools for three groups of users: beginner, intermediate, and professional artists. We build on this user to discuss how smart tools (e.g. using a variety of AI techniques) can be coupled with VR technologies to improve content creation.