ShadowLight. An immersive environment for rapid prototyping and design

Transcription

1 ShadowLight An immersive environment for rapid prototyping and design Kalev H. Leetaru National Center for Supercomputing Applications University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2 Acknowledgements Parts of this project were funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory under contracts DACA D and DACA D The support of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for the use of its CAVE facility as well as the expertise and support of its staff The various user communities who have provided valuable feedback regarding the ShadowLight environment. The author would especially like to thank Alan Craig for his mentorship on this project.

3 What is ShadowLight? ShadowLight is a virtual reality application that provides an immersive mersive environment for multipurpose design and evaluation It is a plugin-powered powered end-user environment that allows rapid design and evaluation It is a plugin-based developer s framework that allows rapid application development

4 Rapid Design and Evaluation ShadowLight (SLM) is primarily an end-user application. Start off with empty world that is populated using available plugins 6DOF wand and head tracking with stereo display immerse user Specialized plugin architecture makes it flexible: from rapid prototyping and design to scientific and industrial tasks Not geared to any one industry, instead uses plugins to mix-and and-match capability

5 Rapid Application Development Instead of writing a standalone VR app, it can be made into an SLM plugin Plugins are self-contained applications that are centrally-managed by SLM Plugins have access to rich API and support functions Plugins can cohabitate single end-user environment encourages app reuse

6 Spatial Design Hierarchy Spatial Design Mediums Desktop software Physical Models Virtual prototyping VR sketch tools 2D interface to 3D medium Expensive Iterative design hard Little to no design support Have to make changes outside Hard to use in other fields Little to no evaluation support Have to evaluate outside

7 Desktop Software Maya, 3D Studio Max, etc Use a variety of interface tricks to deal with having only 2D to represent and interact with a 3D medium Cumbersome, steep learning curve

8 Physical Models Expensive Very hard to make changes Limits iterative design

9 Virtual prototyping Powerful evaluation tools Little to no interactive design capability Very specific types of predefined modifications allowed (ie( ie,, position of steering wheel, interior material) can t change from 4 to 3 wheels on a whim Workflow: import design; evaluate; make minor changes; export and make major changes with external tools; reimport and repeat process Very domain-specific tools, hard to apply to other fields

10 VR sketch tools Three Genres of VR Design Tools Sculpture Drawing Constraint-based Blui, etc Virtual slab of clay Good for volume-based design Hard to do flat or geometric designs CavePainting, etc Virtual paintbrush Good for 2D in 3D design Hard to do volumes Hard to do geometric designs VADeT, etc VR CAD Construction, not Creation Sacrifice spatial freedom of medium

11 VR Operating Systems VROS s like enai allow multiple applications to be used in a single environment Specifically targets using legacy VR apps together Isolates the apps by designating a region of space as belonging to a given app that app exclusively runs in that space, processing any user input from it and outputting any visuals to it

12 Uniting the Genres Could use use a VROS to let all three VR design genres (Sculpture, Drawing, Constraint-based) to be used in a single app? Perhaps - write three separate apps, one in each genre, and use a VROS to let them run together in a single world

13 Coexistence vs Object Space Partitioning Coexistance of Spaces Model used by VROS s applications are given a region of space to exclusively operate in region s can t overlap Object-Based Space Partitioning Model used by SLM - plugins output objects that are placed in space, objects can be intertwined and share space

14 Uniting the Genres: Take 2 VROS Coexistance of Spaces model means that our three tools could be used in a single world, but would have to be used for separate designs ie,, sculpture designs in one part of the world, paintings in another, etc SLM s Object-Based Space Partitioning seems to be more what we are after

15 Uniting the Genres: Take 3 Using SLM, we can write three plugins, one in each of the genres Each plugin outputs independent objects of the given type into space these objects are on their own and can be intertwined and share a region of space We seem to have found what we were looking for

16 Evolution of ShadowLight Before we look in-depth at ShadowLight, let s look at why it was built the way it was There have been three versions of ShadowLight, each building on our previous experiences

17 Three User Communities ShadowLight was first used in architectural design wanted continuum of manipulation and control over designs Middle school students wanted rubber- stamp creation ability Researchers wanted ability to employ remote tools and evaluative processes in design environment

18 Architecture SLM was first used by University of Illinois School of Architecture for senior and grad-level design studios Class was taught for 5 semesters with SLM in CAVE Wanted continuum of manipulation and control over their designs Professor Joy Malnar critiquing student s design (Photo by Bill Sherman)

19 Education / Outreach Used in outreach program with 7 th and 8 th grade girls to illustrate high technology in non-contemporary roles Taught for three terms, with groups of each term Wanted simplistic rubber stamp creation ability Local 8 th grade students using ShadowLight (

20 Military / Research Worked with US Army CERL on two projects interactive evaluation of military structures and battle simulation display Also working with other groups to port their simulation tools Wanted to employ remote tools and evaluative processes within the design environment

21 One Framework to Rule Them All The three user communities had very different needs Rather than make three separate applications, it was decided to use a plugin architecture to let a single framework be extended to fit each genre Added benefit of being able to share capabilities between genres

22 Design in ShadowLight 6DOF wand and head tracking with stereo display immerse user Start off with empty world that is populated using the available plugins ShadowLight dispatches user actions to plugins Currently loaded plugins define what ShadowLight becomes to user

23 Basic Design Simple freeform strip tool lets user click in space and drag wand about to draw a flat strip in space

24 Intermediate Design Can use rich selection of materials and add transparency and other effects

25 Advanced Design Plugin model means more advanced media can be inserted into world Fluid simulation plugin inserts simple reactive fluid bodies into world these can be freely placed and inter-located with other elements

26 Design Reuse By using a single framework, communities can share plugins Researcher can use fluid plugin to research parameter optimization Architect can use it to spruce up an atrium design with live water Instructor can use it to teach wave properties

27 Development in ShadowLight Plugins as stand-alone alone applications makes it hard to manage things Must provide more than a VROS collection of objects must be centrally managed Can t use semantically-rich scenegraph like DIVE et al some objects (like computational steering output) are only partially defined on local side You don t have to worry about this SLM takes care of it for you

28 Plugin Development ShadowLight provides rich API User action is dispatched to plugin via set of API calls Centrally-managed scenegraph plugin processes user actions and updates scenegraph

29 Plugins as Rapid App Dev ShadowLight plugins can be used as a Rapid Application Development environment Instead of porting entire application to VR, just write plugin that takes user actions and sends them back to app, and takes output from app and converts into scenegraph geometry

30 Case Study: SceneControl We demonstrated this RAD capability with SceneControl plugin Created for US Army CERL, allowed standalone battle simulator to issue commands to remote control a ShadowLight world Could also pause things and make changes to objects in the world

31 Conclusion VR has a lot of benefits over traditional mediums for design SLM uses a special plugin architecture that allows it to mediate between design and evaluation needs SLM becomes a different tool based on the available set of plugins SLM has been used for four years, over three versions, but the plugin architecture is the newest version and we are working with groups to develop plugins for it work is already underway on a set of educational applications