Hierarchical Structuring of the Impressions of 3D Shapes Targeting for Art and Non-art University Students

The spread of digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers has increased opportunities to utilize 3D data. A support system for users without specialized knowledge must model the relationships between impressions received from shapes and the shapes’ physical elements. Regarding the structure of impressions, previous works have hypothesized that a hierarchical structure with a lower layer closely related to physical parameters and an upper layer representing more abstract impressions. To extract the hierarchical structure of impressions for 3D shapes in this work, we conducted the Evaluation Grid Method to visualize an impression’s hierarchical structure. Ten art university students and 10 non-art university students participated in the experiment and provided impressions they had formed from the 3D shapes presented as photographs. We extracted the hierarchical structure, including the impressions used in previous works in the upper side. The impressions representing the state and the features of shapes were extracted in the lower side. By classifying the language expressions representing the state and features from aspects of the shape’s local features, the language expressions were classified into some similar viewpoints between participants’ groups. While the language expressions representing abstract impressions varied between groups, and the language expressions related to “activity” were extracted only from art students. These findings revealed that there is not only a generality in the viewpoint strongly related to physical quantity but also differences based on knowledge and experience among individuals with regard to the more abstract impression.