Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Our research on design and computer graphics with heterogeneous data has the potential to change many different application domains. Such applications include:

Product design will be significantly accelerated and facilitated. Our interviews with car designers illustrate how the separate working practices of 2D illustrators, 3D modelers and artists who create physical prototypes results in a slow and complex process with frequent misunderstandings and corrective iterations between different people and different media. This could significantly accelerate the design process (from months to weeks), result in much better communication between the different experts, or even create new types of experts who cross boundaries of disciplines today.

Mass customization will allow end customers to participate in the design of a product before buying it. In this context of “cloud-based design”, users of an e-commerce website will be provided with controls on the main variations of a product created by a professional designer. Intuitive modeling tools will also allow users to personalize the shape and appearance of the object while remaining within the bounds of the pre-defined design space.

Digital instructions for creating and repairing objects, in collaboration with other groups working in 3D fabrication could have significant impact in sustainable development and allow anyone to be a creator of things, not just consumers, the motto of the makers movement.

Gaming experience individualization is an important emerging trend; using our results players will also be able to integrate personal objects or environments (e.g., their homes, neighborhoods) into any realistic 3D game. The success of creative games where the player constructs their world illustrates the potential of such solutions. This approach also applies to serious gaming, with applications in medicine, education/learning, training etc. Such interactive experiences with high-quality images of heterogeneous 3D content will be also applicable to archeology (e.g., realistic presentation of different reconstruction hypotheses), urban planning and renovation where new elements can be realistically used with captured imagery. Other applications could include enhanced personal photography/videography, or interactive experiences to enhance news reports.

Virtual training, which today is restricted to pre-defined virtual environment(s) that are expensive and hard to create; with our solutions we open the possiblity to seamlessly and realistically use on-site data together with the actual virtual training environment. As an example, virtual reality has been used for training locomotive drivers for manual intervention on railway tracks; the environment used is a simplistic synthetic scene. With our results, any real site can be captured, and the synthetic elements for the interventions rendered with high levels of realism, thus greatly enhancing the quality of the training experience.

Other applications may include scientific domains which use photogrammetric data (captured with various 3D scanners), such as geophysics and seismology. Note however that our goal is not to produce 3D data suitable for numerical simulations; our approaches can help however in combining captured data with presentations and visualization of scientific information (involving a collaboration with other groups with experts in Visualization.)