The $3 Recognizer: Simple 3D Gesture Recognition on Mobile Devices

paper

This is an extension of the $1 to 3D. It does not support all the original $1 shapes, but it does add a few new shapes, such as tennis serve and hacksaw.

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This is cool, and I would like to see a video or a user study of how well this works for 3D sketching.

An Empirical Evaluation of Touch and Tangible Interfaces for Tabletop Displays

paper

This paper compares several different methods for interacting on a table type display. They have implemented a touch based interface as well as a model-based interface on a single surface. They compared the touch and model based interaction for a variety of computing tasks and found that touch was better for some tasks and models were better for other tasks.

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I personally have never played around with any model based interfaces. I can see the usefulness of such an interface, though I am not sure that many small pieces would be such a good thing.

FreeDrawer: a free-form sketchingsystem on the responsive workbench

paper

These dudes use a pen to sketch in 3D. They employ curve and surface smoothing to create smooth drawings.

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This paper was not so interesting. Drawing in 3D is nice, but I have seen better methods. Also no tests were done, so we don't know how well it actually works.