Generative Terrain Authoring with Mid-air Hand Sketching in Virtual Reality

Terrain generation and authoring in Virtual Reality (VR) offers unique benefits, including 360-degree views, improved spatial perception, immersive and intuitive design experience and natural input modalities. Yet even in VR it can be challenging to integrate natural input modalities, preserve artistic controls and lower the effort of landscape prototyping. To tackle these challenges, we present our VR-based terrain generation and authoring system, which utilizes hand tracking and a generative model to allow users to quickly prototype natural landscapes, such as mountains, mesas, canyons and volcanoes. Via positional hand tracking and hand gesture detection, users can use their hands to draw mid-air strokes to indicate desired shapes for the landscapes. A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network trained by using real-world terrains and their height maps then helps to generate a realistic landscape which combines features of training data and the mid-air strokes. In addition, users can use their hands to further manipulate their mid-air strokes to edit the landscapes. In this paper, we explore this design space and present various scenarios of terrain generation. Additionally, we evaluate our system across a diverse user base that varies in VR experience and professional background. The study results indicate that our system is feasible, user-friendly and capable of fast prototyping.