Development of a 3D conceptual design environment using a commodity head mounted display virtual reality system

Design processes for engineered systems are resource intensive and have a significant impact on a product’s profitability. Over half of a product’s total costs can be attributed to design stage decisions. The development of product designs often involves creating complex 3D models in a 2D environment, a non-trivial task. Current design workflows involve the utilization of robust modeling software on a 2D display. However, previous research highlights the benefits of visualizing full-scale 3D models in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. These environments aid a user in understanding complex 3D geometry. Despite the benefits of VR, these systems have traditionally been large and costly, preventing widespread implementation within companies. However, the commercial availability of high-fidelity, commodity VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) provides an opportunity to explore the potential benefits this technology may bring to engineering design. This paper details a proof of concept VR environment displayed in a commodity HMD; specifically, the HTC Vive. The environment supports creation of full-scale 3D product geometry at the conceptual phase of a design process. The environment contains a World-in-Miniature (WIM) model for enhanced interaction and usability. WIM manipulation allows a user to modify full-scale geometry by adjusting corresponding parts on the miniature model. Free-form mesh deformation was also implemented to provide designers with flexibility and efficiency not found in traditional design packages. Vital design metrics (e.g., cost, weight, and center of mass) were incorporated to allow a user to perform preliminary design analysis to assess product feasibility. The environment was designed to provide an intuitive user interface with only a subset of features found in traditional design packages, tailored to conceptual design needs. This work aims to be a building block for the fruition of a conceptual design environment in immersive VR, motivated by proposed benefits of such a scenario. The design environment in this work is not intended to replace traditional Computer Aided Design (CAD) packages, but rather to enhance the conceptual design phase by providing conceptual designers with a system optimized for the task at hand. Throughout the development process, unique challenges and affordances associated with commodity HMDs were identified, explored, and detailed in this work

Specializing Interfaces for Citizen Science Segmentation of Volumetric Data

Segmentation of 3D and time-varying volumetric (4D) image data is considered a time and resource intensive bottleneck in scientific endeavors. Automatic methods are becoming more reliable, but many data sets still require manual intervention. This can mainly be attributed to the characteristics of the image data not being amenable to automated methods, the existence of variations in or poor image quality, or the need for an expert to review and edit results from an automatic technique. Manually segmenting volumetric data is a challenge even for those more experienced. Understanding the 3D nature of the data and navigating through the 3D environment poses some of the main difficulties of the task. Understanding what it means to segment data, and what a contour and a set of contours portrays is key to producing meaningful and usable results. Our goal is to construct a system that will allow even novices to segment 3D data and produce results that experts and scientists can review and use. Through the use of fe tures such as tutorials, contouring protocols, navigation aids, and other interface enhancements, we believe that we can create a workflow that will allow any level of user to work with and understand 3D data. We propose a guided segmentation system that (1) lets experts create data specific segmentation aids, (2) helps users create a meaningful segmentation using these aids, and (3) allows the experts to use the results to provide helpful information to scientists

Dynamic worlds in miniature

The World in Miniature (WIM) metaphor allows users to interact and travel efficiently in virtual environments. In addition to the first-person perspective offered by typical VR applications, the WIM offers a second dynamic viewpoint through a hand-held miniature copy of the virtual environment. In the original WIM paper the miniature was a scaled down replica of the whole environment, thus limiting the technique to simple models being manipulated at a single level of scale. Several WIM extensions have been proposed where the replica shows only a part of the virtual environment. In this paper we present an improved visualization of WIM that supports arbitrarily-complex, densely-occluded scenes. In particular, we discuss algorithms for selecting the region of the virtual environment which will be covered by the miniature copy and efficient algorithms for handling 3D occlusion from an exocentric viewpoint.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Reflecting on the Design and Implementation Issues of Virtual Environments

We present a candid reflection on the issues surrounding virtual environment design and implementation (VEDI) in order to: (1) motivate the topic as a research-worthy undertaking, and (2) attempt a comprehensive listing of impeding VEDI issues so they can be addressed. In order to structure this reflection, an idealized model of VEDI is presented. This model, investigated using mixed methods, resulted in 67 distinct issues along the model\u27s transitions and pathways. These were clustered into 11 themes and used to support five VEDI research challenges