Visual representations are essential to explore and communicate an idea or a phenomenon.
Narrative storytelling for the infection phenomenon

Contributions:
- A novel sketch-based modeling method to design distributions of 3D shape, enabling the modeling of dense 3D environments such as biological tissues with fiber networks in which cells evolve;
- A solution for sketch-based animation, applicable to both 2.5D and 3D settings, that builds on standard schematic conventions in biology to allow the specification of motion and deformation;
- An interface for specifying and controlling temporal narrative scenarios, with a series of events triggered over time;
- A final user study with 11 expert biologists, enabling us to validate the relevance of our tool and to identify in which use cases 2.5D vs. 3D illustrations are the most relevant.
Publications:
- DynBioSketch: A tool for sketching dynamic visual summaries in biology, and its application to infection phenomena – Pauline Olivier, Tara Butler, Pascal Guehl, Jean-Luc Coll, Renaud Charbrier, Pooran Memari, and Marie-Paule Cani. Computer & Graphics Special Section on VCBM 2023, June 2024
- Bio-sketch: A new medium for interactive storytelling illustrated by the infection phenomenon – Pauline Olivier, Renaud Charbrier, Pooran Memari, Jean-Luc Coll and Marie-Paule Cani. Technical paper and talk at Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM), Nörrkoping (Sweden), September 2023
Analysis/Synthesis of sketched-based shape distribution

Contributions:
- a fine-to-coarse analysis method enabling to hierarchically cluster user strokes depending on their proximity in position, alignment and/or orientation, into a support structure hierarchy;
- a coarse-to-fine planar synthesis method through domain partitioning, based on the extracted hierarchy;
- a second synthesis method based on the same input that creates a 3D distribution of elements perceptually similar to the input sketch, and in which users can navigate.
Publications:
- Structured Shape-Patterns from a Sketch: A Multi-Scale Approach – Pauline Olivier, Pooran Memari and Marie-Paule Cani. Technical Paper and talk at Graphics Interface 2022, Montréal (Canada), May 2022
- Perceptual distribution of anisotropic 2D strokes – Pauline Olivier, Pooran Memari and Marie-Paule Cani. Talk at the French Workshop on Geometric Modeling (Journées du Groupe de Travail en Modélisation Géométrique), Online, March 2021
Sketching evolving environments for architectural design

Contributions:
- A recursive solution for creating a 3D sketch by drawing on semi-transparent 3D canvases, themselves extruded from user’s strokes interpreted as footprints — with the associated visualization and editing tools;
- A method, based on local attraction to dense stroke regions, for enabling interactive navigation through the alternative designs that the nested sketch visually suggests. This navigation may not only drive displacement, but also free-form deformation of the nested 3D canvases carrying the user’s strokes.
Publications:
- Nested Explorative Maps: A new 3D canvas for conceptual design in architecture – Pauline Olivier, Renaud Chabrier, Damien Rohmer, Eric De Thoisy, and Marie-Paule Cani. Technical paper at Shape Modeling International 2019 (special Issue Computer & Graphics). Talk at the International Geometry Summit 2019, Vancouver (Canada), June 2019
- Interactive 3D canvases for a coarse-to-fine sketching – Application to conceptual design in architecture – Pauline Olivier and Marie-Paule Cani. Short paper and talk at the Computer Graphics French Days (Journées Française d’Informatique Graphique), Poitiers (France), November 2018