Assisting to Sketch Unskilled People with Fixed and Interactive Virtual Templates

This work presents a study of performance improvement of unskilled people to drawn simple sketches. We have assisted the unskilled people when drawn using a haptic interface which acts as a virtual guide taking advantage of its force feedback capabilities. In the first part of the study, an application has been developed to extract fixed templates from image files; the application extract the principal edges in the images to build output trajectories (templates) that are used by haptic interface controller, after that, the user can "fill" the virtual templates with the assistance of the force feedback capabilities of the interface. Based on the obtained results for fixed templates, a second application was developed; the user can generate interactive templates indicating where he/she desires to put a geometrical template (circle, line or arc) inside the haptic interface's workplace; once that the position of the template is defined, the interface shows its position graphically and then user can fill it assisted by the haptic interface force feedback.