Evaluation of Designer Feedback Systems in Design for Manufacturability

The research study introduces a new designer feedback tool called Three Dimensional Integrated Feedback (3DIF) tool to convey manufacturability analysis results early in the conceptual design phase. The study evaluates and compares different modalities of manufacturability feedback given to de-sign engineers. The conceptual design stage is critical in deter-mining the feasibility of the whole production process. Providing designers with early suggestions and feedback about the manu-facturability of product designs will help to improve their design and save time and cost to manufacture. Feedback given to the design engineers could be in any form text, 2D markups, 3D data or verbal. Feedback can contain insufficient data or can be diffi-cult to interpret leading to frequent design iterations and in-crease in lead time. It is important that feedback should be able to convey necessary design information and should be in lan-guage understandable by design engineers. The modality of feed-back affects interpretability of the data presented. The study compares between no feedback, text-based feedback, 2D feed-back and 3D feedback modalities in the casting process of manu-facturing. The results expected from the study will help us to determine the appropriate modality of feedback that improves design performance of both expert and novice designers

Web-based Stereo Rendering for Visualization and Annotation of Scientific Volumetric Data

Advancement in high-throughput microscopy technology such as the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscopy (KESM) is enabling the production of massive amounts of high-resolution and high-quality volumetric data of biological microstructures. To fully utilize these data, they should be efficiently distributed to the scientific research community through the Internet and should be easily visualized, annotated, and analyzed. Given the volumetric nature of the data, visualizing them in 3D is important. However, since we cannot assume that every end user has high-end hardware, an approach that has minimal hardware and software requirements will be necessary, such as a standard web browser running on a typical personal computer. There are several web applications that facilitate the viewing of large collections of images. Google Maps and Google Maps-like interfaces such as Brainmaps.org allow users to pan and zoom 2D images efficiently. However, they do not yet support the rendering of volumetric data in their standard web interface. The goal of this thesis is to develop a light-weight volumetric image viewer using existing web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript while exploiting the properties of stereo vision to facilitate the viewing and annotations of volumetric data. The choice of stereogram over other techniques was made since it allows the usage of raw image stacks produced by the 3D microscope without any extra computation on the data at all. Operations to generate stereo images using 2D image stacks include distance attenuation and binocular disparity. By using HTML and JavaScript that are computationally cheap, we can accomplish both tasks dynamically in a standard web browser, by overlaying the images with intervening semi-opaque layers. The annotation framework has also been implemented and tested. In order for annotation to work in this environment, it should also be in the form of stereogram and should aid the merging of stereo pairs. The current technique allows users to place a mark (dot) on one image stack, and its projected position onto the other image stack is calculated dynamically on the client side. Other extra metadata such as textual descriptions can be entered by the user as well. To cope with the occlusion problem caused by changes in the z direction, the structure traced by the user will be displayed on the side, together with the data stacks. Using the same stereo-gram creation techniques, the traces made by the user is dynamically generated and shown as stereogram. We expect the approach presented in this thesis to be applicable to a broader scientific domain, including geology and meteorology