Sketching via Hand Tracking in Virtual Reality for Architectural Design Process

There are a lot of tools that architects can use for sketching in order to conceptualize design ideas, such as the classic pen and paper or more technologically advanced, tablet computer and stylus pen. With the wide availability of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, owing to their low cost, they became another medium for realizing architectural designs. VR headsets handle interactions with their controller devices, which can be considered not intuitive compared to pen-based input devices. On the other hand, progress made in hand tracking research made it possible to be integrated into the VR headsets. In this thesis, we explore usage effectiveness of hand tracking as an input device in VR for architectural sketching purpose. We developed three sketching methods that make use of hand tracking and conducted a user study to evaluate the methods based on their accuracy, speed of realizing a sketch, and their subjective properties. In order to confirm our findings, we developed an additional sketching method based on the existing controller input device and compared the results from hand-based sketching methods against it. Lastly, we developed a concept application aimed to be used during architectural design processes, where we utilize the hand-based sketching method that performed most effectively according to our user study results.