Interactive Augmented Reality for 3D Modeling

Abstract

Computer 3D graphics has contributed for a revolution in various commercial and non commercial domains such as film industry, computer 3D games, medical simulations, manufacturing, designing, scientific visualizations . . . The requirement for high quality 3D graphics with enhanced realism is rising in every single second. Therefore, efficient construction of 3D models in a user friendly approach has become a major obligation for 3D software developers. Yet, most people find it difficult to use typical desktop systems regardless of their skills. Though the human brain has its massive spatial capabilities of dealing with the third dimension, unfortunately it is evident that they are yet not fully bridged with the enhancing computer power. Existing human computer interaction in 3D modeling software has several drawbacks. Static views on 3D models in spite of user position appear to be jamming some required information of the models which brain can process simultaneously. Typical mouse that slides on 2D plane limits the possible interactions at a time. A novice need some time to learn the mapping between 2D mouse movement and 3D transformation. Further, these software systems rarely use the brain s ability to tally the multi sensorial inputs. After inspecting these setbacks and viabilities, we hypothesized that 3D modeling tasks can be enhanced by using interactive augmented reality. Augmented reality is the accumulation of synthetic senses to real world senses in such a way that realism is maintained. A cost beneficial prototype system was developed where finger is used to control virtual 3D models in a cubic workspace. In our prototype system, human user can use his/her own fingers or a pointer device to deal with the virtual objects. The workspace is a cubic frame. User will see the virtual objects embedded into the video grabbed from a camera placed in his forehead. The output will be shown in a head mounted display. The important fact is that, user can move around virtual objects and look around how they have been modified. The system has a special capability of drawing in the 3D space similar to a 2D bitmap image drawing. Drawing objects in 3D space differs a lot from the frame based 3D modeling. Users were given oppertunity to draw a sphere, translate and reduce size in the evaluation procedure. After evaluating the system, some drawbacks were extracted such as cyber sickness issues that depends on hardware issues. Dextrous manipulation is disturbed by the ARToolkit marker that is placed on the center of the view. It was found that the users have a high degree of interest in using an AR system over desktop systems, yet the issues such as tracking errors, head mounted display issues ... need to be solved.