Augmented reality tangible interfaces for CAD design review

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2005-01-01
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Sidharta, Ronald
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Altmetrics
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Theses & dissertations (Interdisciplinary)
Abstract

CAD programs have been in development for almost forty years. In the beginning, CAD was synonymous with the electronic creation and storage of 2D drawings, a replacement for the traditional draftsmen's table. Though CAD has evolved over the ensuing years to a primarily 3D tool, its 2D roots are clearly evident in the user interface. The creation of 2D drawings maps naturally to the interfaces provided by 2D desktop computers, but as the role of CAD programs has become increasingly three dimensional, the 2D analogy is extended beyond the breaking point. Unlike 2D drawing, the desktop metaphor does not provide an intuitive mechanism for the creation and manipulation of 3D objects. In order to adapt the 2D desktop to create and manage 3D objects, new interface methodologies and special purpose widgets were invented to map 2D actions into 3D, mappings that require significant training for users and increase their cognitive load. The goal of the research presented in this thesis is to consider an alternative to 2D desktop based interfaces for design review, an alternative that reduce the users' cognitive load while selecting and manipulating 3D objects during the design review process. In this thesis, we identify three specific interaction challenges common to design reviews: 3D browsing, 3D positioning/orientation, and 3D assembly/disassembly. We then describe a new set of Augmented Tangible Interfaces (ATI) designed to more naturally support these three tasks. ATI uses augmented reality techniques to allow a computer to recognize a set of tangible objects and generate virtual graphics that integrate with a user's vision, letting those users "see" and "handle" those virtual 3D objects naturally, as if they were real, physical objects. In this thesis, we discuss the research problem and the related research that motivated us to develop this new ATI. We then discuss the detailed implementation of our system, both hardware and software. In the HCI consideration chapter we discuss the usability of the system and then discuss future work.

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Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2005