Tadamasa Sawada «Contour drawing world»

Artists can represent a 3D object by using only contours in a 2D contour-drawing and people can reliably perceive 3D shapes from such drawing. How useful visual information from contour drawings actually is in a real dynamical scene and how well can people interact with objects? To address this issue, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR) device that can show a participant a contour-drawing of a real dynamical scene in an immersive manner. Three behavioral experiments were conducted to test the performance of people in a variety of run-of-the-mill tasks with contour-drawings. We found that the people could perform these tasks well with contour-drawings. This contour information may be sufficient for our visual system to obtain much of the 3D information for visuomotor interactions in our everyday life.