Multiple viewers in projection-based multi-screen immersive environments

Projection-based immersive virtual environments are very powerful tools to work on engineering and scientific problems involving teams of researchers. These environments enable the development of virtual representations of a problem domain in which multiple users can simultaneously share a virtual experience, providing a unique infrastructure for team work. The current limitation for effective teamwork is that these systems support only a single viewpoint, usually corresponding to a user wearing a head tracking device. This thesis presents a hardware and software design to enable multiple simultaneous viewpoints in a multi-screen immersive environment. This system is designed to be flexible and easily scalable, preparing for future expansion to additional users when the underlying technologies allow it. The design extends the commonly used single user time-multiplexed stereo viewing model to multiple users. This research also extends existing development tools to support our multiple viewer virtual design. This work also focuses on extending existing applications to multiple viewer environments. A design and implementation of the system is presented in detail. This system enables two users viewing stereoscopic images or four users viewing monoscopic images to simultaneously view the correct images projected on the screen from their tracked viewpoint

Software Development Support System for a Microcomputer Environment

This study examines some existing software development support systems with the intent of adapting some of the techniques found to a microcomputer software development environment. The motivation for doing this study arose from experiences gained as a part of a microcomputer software development project. During the course of this project, a number of very annoying events plagued us. Parallel updates and modifications to out-of-date copies of source code necessitated the redoing of work previously thought to be finished. In addition, these events caused much confusion. Another difficulty which was encountered was that on occasion, changes were made which were not propagated into the executable system. As the project grew more complex, the process of linking the system also grew to be a burdensome chore. Procedures were established to deal with these problems as they arose; however, these procedures depended on fallible humans, and mistakes still occurred far too often. This paper looks at what has been done in regard to these problems and presents an adaptation of some of the previous work to the type of environment in which these experiences took place. The result is intended as a specification for a system to deal with a number of the above-mentioned difficulties automatically. I hope that this work will serve as a guideline for anyone interested in producing such a microcomputer software development support system.Computing and Information Science

SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

Framework Programmable Platform for the Advanced Software Development Workstation (FPP/ASDW). Demonstration framework document. Volume 1: Concepts and activity descriptions

The Framework Programmable Software Development Platform (FPP) is a project aimed at effectively combining tool and data integration mechanisms with a model of the software development process to provide an intelligent integrated software development environment. Guided by the model, this system development framework will take advantage of an integrated operating environment to automate effectively the management of the software development process so that costly mistakes during the development phase can be eliminated. The Advanced Software Development Workstation (ASDW) program is conducting research into development of advanced technologies for Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE)

Research into software executives for space operations support

Research concepts pertaining to a software (workstation) executive which will support a distributed processing command and control system characterized by high-performance graphics workstations used as computing nodes are presented. Although a workstation-based distributed processing environment offers many advantages, it also introduces a number of new concerns. In order to solve these problems, allow the environment to function as an integrated system, and present a functional development environment to application programmers, it is necessary to develop an additional layer of software. This 'executive' software integrates the system, provides real-time capabilities, and provides the tools necessary to support the application requirements

Exploiting persistence in CASE technology

Bibliography: pages 102-107.A Design Workbench has been built for Napier88 [MBC+94] as part of the natural progression towards developing better product systems and improving software construction tools. The system includes a Metamodeller (enabling users to specify the data and process models they prefer), a Model Builder which supports multiple coexisting models and a Target System Generator. Experience using the Workbench has shown that it is easy to use, increases productivity, improves programming standards and facilitates code sharing. This thesis demonstrates the benefits of orthogonal persistence for Computer-Aided Software Engineering by describing an initial design environment and its subsequent extension to include support for multiple co-existing models

Graphics Technology in Space Applications (GTSA 1989)

This document represents the proceedings of the Graphics Technology in Space Applications, which was held at NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center on April 12 to 14, 1989 in Houston, Texas. The papers included in these proceedings were published in general as received from the authors with minimum modifications and editing. Information contained in the individual papers is not to be construed as being officially endorsed by NASA

An illuminated workspace for iterative design

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [79]-81).The rapid development of digital technology has led to the widespread of virtual or CAD based design environments. However, these tools lack a means of combing physical and digital representations in order to support the iterative design process. The illuminated workspace provides a self-contained design environment in which a number of physical, computational, statistical, and visual representations can be combined in a single creative space. This thesis describes a landscape design workbench called Illuminating Clay that allows designers to intuitively manipulate free-form physical models and simultaneously interact with computational analysis of these physical representations. This thesis shows how the system supports multiple forms of representation - physical models, 2-D images, digital models, and dynamic simulations - in the early stage of design and allows for an easy transition between physical and digital modeling in the process of landscape design.by Yao Wang.S.M

Visualization and Animation of a Missile/Target Encounter

Existing missile/target encounter modeling and simulation systems focus on improving probability of kill models. Little research has been done to visualize these encounters. These systems can be made more useful to the engineers by incorporating current computer graphics technology for visualizing and animating the encounter. Our research has been to develop a graphical simulation package for visualizing both endgame and full fly-out encounters. Endgame visualization includes showing the interaction of a missile, its fuze cone proximity sensors, and its target during the final fraction of a second of the missile/target encounter. Additionally, this system displays dynamic effects such as the warhead fragmentation pattern and the specific skewing of the fragment scattering due to missile yaw at the point of detonation. Fly-out visualization, on the other hand, involves full animation of a missile from launch to target. Animating the results of VisSim fly-out simulations provides the engineer a more efficient means of analyzing his data. This research also involves investigating fly-out animation via the World Wide Web