Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
n n n n Augmented Reality placement on the physical data.” What often frustrates Baron is the In Autodesk’s mixed-reality setup for exploring building exteriors, the tilt, rotation, and angle of the gadget rep- resenting the camera determine the POV of the building exterior in the monitor. The small-scale building repre- sents the detailed digital model to be visualized. “With virtual-reality technology,” says Baron, “we can marry a bare-bones vehicle structure with a beautiful digital model that has all the details, including climate-control devices, then we can inspect it for craftsman- ship: Are there exposed fasteners? Are the wire routings in the way? What does the headlamp housing look like? It’s hard to gauge what the customer would see [without a physical proto- type]. Tat’s what’s so powerful about virtual reality and augmented reality. It can represent the customer’s point of view.” One of the virtual-reality systems Baron is evaluating is Realtime Technology’s (RTT’s) DeltaGen and RealView software. Photorealistic digital prototypes built in RTT DeltaGen can be used with the RTT Immersive module, which allows users to examine a 3D model by employing a virtual- reality head-mounted display. With the RTT RealView module, a person can superimpose digital mock-ups into live Web feeds and camera views. Tose who wish to deploy the immersive system in panoramic CAVE environments may distribute the visualization tasks over computer clusters using the RTT Scale module. One of the challenges of using a virtual- reality setup, acknowledges Baron, is “con- vincing people that the output we see is reliable, that it really does represent the real world.” Now that she and her colleagues have overcome this hurdle, they confront another challenge in validating mixed-reality systems. Ford evaluated the use of RTT RealView to replace key vehicle features by overlaying several virtual design alternatives on a physical model. Baron says she can see the potential in this approach. “It is compelling when the vir- tual and physical align as expected,” she says. “Te virtual data is validated by its correct 24 July 2010 disparity between hardware and soft- ware technologies. For instance, even though the latest generation of CPUs and GPUs are designed to perform multithreaded computing, many pro- fessional engineering software develop- ers have not refined the code to take ad- vantage of multithreaded computing. “I had a 64-bit hardware system for at least two years before I began to see 64- bit apps,” she observes with a chuckle. Constructing a physical vehicle mock- up in clay or foam on structural frames usually takes about six weeks, with a price tag of $250,000 to $1 million, es- timates Baron. (Te greater the level of detail, the higher the cost.) Ford used to build four prototypes for each new vehicle model in development. Today, the number has been reduced to one. “I’m a huge advocate of doing immersive design reviews,” says Baron. “I think that’s an area untapped by some com- panies that could benefit from it. It gives us the power to represent you, the customer.” Seeing What’s Not There Often, design software maker Autodesk would give the public sneak peeks of its technologies under development, by making them available through Autodesk Labs at http://labs.autodesk. com (see “Lab Report,” April 2010). Project Newport, described as “a real-time 3D story- building technology designed specifically for architectural visualization and presentation,” is one such technology. It represents an amalgam of the company’s game visualization and CAD modeling software. When hooked up to a physi- cal interface, it becomes a mixed-reality system that lets people see what’s not really there. A critical component of Autodesk’s mixed-re- ality systems (currently in prototype stage and not yet commercially available) is the Mixed Re- ality Interface hardware developed by technolo- gy partners Komme-Z (www.kommerz.at) that functions as navigation space. A series of hidden cameras mounted inside track the movement of the top surface of a mouse, allowing the system to translate the movement it detects into the hy- pothetical 3D space projected onto the display monitor. Tis setup lets a person navigate, for instance, inside a digital building model con- structed in Autodesk Revit software simply by moving a mouse along a 2D floor plan. Te same setup allows the mouse to be used as a virtual camera, aimed at another physical object associated with 3D data. Terefore, by moving or tilting the mouse, users can inspect the digital data as though they were standing before the full-scale structure. Te mouse, in fact, could be any portable object (for ex- ample, a toy figurine), as long as its bottom surface is equipped with a pattern recognizable by the cameras and the computer. In augmented reality, a marker (often a small placard with a unique printed pattern) could represent any digital data, allowing the software to project the digital data (a 3D building model or an automobile) as part of its vision. Tis allows a person to swap materials in a digital building, or superimpose scanned textures on a real building, simply by swapping markers. Brian Pene, an Autodesk technical evange- list, observes, “With the pervasiveness of tablet PCs and portable computing devices, the fu- ture is in mobile computing. Imagine if the computer vision can track my hand, then my hand itself can become an interface to manip- ulate objects in augmented reality.” In another form of augmented reality, Autodesk’s MatchMover camera-tracking soft- ware may be used to superimpose 3D digital buildings onto video footage, by associating key points in the video footage with correlat- ing vertices in the digital building. “Te tech- nology has been available for some time, but it used to require batch processing,” explains Brian Mathews, vice president of Autodesk Labs. “With the increased processing power available, we can now do this kind of visual- ization in real time.” He did his most recent demonstration on a standard laptop. It went off without a hitch. At the moment, software-based, pixel-track- ing algorithms seem to produce more accurate results than sensors embedded in cell phones and portable devices, but when sensors be- come more sophisticated, augmented-reality deployment may become as easy as pointing an iPhone at a marker. Last Christmas, Home Depot launched a new line of Interactive Gift Cards. Te dif- ference between these and other gift cards is, when recipients hold up the card before a Web- cam-equipped computer, they can see them- selves holding a product—say, a power drill or a bucket of paint—corresponding to the value of that particular card. (For a demonstration of Home Depot’s gift card, visit http://3d. homedepot.com.) At home or at work, before long, augmented reality may become an everyday reality. n Kenneth Wong is a freelance writer who focuses on the computer game and CAD industries, innovative usage of technology, and its implications. He can be reached at Kennethwongsf@earthlink.net.