About 3DVIA
3DVIA is Dassault Systèmes’ brand for online 3D lifelike experiences. It establishes 3D as a mass media for consumer and professional communities, and allows anyone to imagine, play, and experience consumer products and services used in our daily lives through online services. Once perfected in the virtual world, they can be optimized as such in the physical world. The Virtools product line is part of 3DVIA. For more information about 3DVIA, go to: http://www.3dvia.com
Dassault – REALVIZ® partnership
Dassault announced (26 June) an expanded partnership with REALVIZ®, a leading developer of image-processing software, whose technology will be integrated with DS’s 3DVIA online platform and services. REALVIZ’ VTour software enables the creation of photo-realistic 3D environments, from pictures to videos, to be extensively reused in interactive 3DVIA life experiences created with Virtools.
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can:
walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it’s gigapixels in size;
see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
This course provides a comprehensive overview to user interface technologies on the newly emerging interactive tabletops and large wall displays. The course will cover input devices, interface metaphors, modality of interaction, sensing technologies, applications, and future directions. Materials will be drawn from both commercial systems and research prototypes.
Now in its 5th year, Microsoft, through the Imagine Cup, is encouraging young people to apply their imagination , passion and creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world.
The theme for 2007 is Education – “imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all.”
The students who participate in the Imagine Cup all over the world represent the next generation of technology and business leaders. Their creativity and innovation speaks volumes about the promise of technology to really make a difference in peoples’ lives in the way we think, work and communicate.
INTOI explores a new way of user interaction with circular shaped recognitions areas to switch tools or to change settings. The system utilises screen back projection, hand tracking, and Anoto technology.
INTOI took part at the world biggest programming and software-engineering competition – the Microsoft Imagine Cup. The title for this year is Imagine a world with better education, which is what INTOI basically does. Currently in the top 6, this entry will compete against the other 5 finalist in the Interface Design category in Seoul, Korea in August.
INTOI won the Austrian competition in the Software Design-category.
Watch the video and then read on …
Technical Details
An aluminum frame holds the rear projection surface consisting of two acrylic panels with a back-light foil in-between. The panel in the back is an approximately 6mm thick acrylic to ensure a robust writing surface. The front side cover is an only 2mm thin acrylic that protects the projection film from being scratched. Behind the flipchart panel a PAL infrared camera is mounted for hand feature tracking described in a later paragraph. In order to get acceptable tracking results, infrared spotlights are assembled in the front of the projection wall.
Anoto pen technology
The wireless pen devices keep track of their movements on an Anoto paper, which contains a unique dot pattern almost invisible to the human eye. By using an embedded infrared camera, the pen’s image processing unit can localize its position exactly. The collected information is streamed to computer via Bluetooth technology. The high resolution Anoto pattern is printed on a special back-light foil in order to get a high contrast projection as well as accurate pen tracking results.
Multi-user interaction
INTOI allows up to 8 users to work on the same application at the same time. All of the Anoto pens have unique IDs in order to keep track of each user’s drawings. Pen settings such as color, stroke width and the currently selected tool are stored for each pen separately.
Hand interaction
The infinite sized drawing area of the INTOI application can be panned by sliding one hand over the projection surface. Alternatively, using the second hand enables the user to zoom in and out of the current page by moving the hands either apart or together. The infrared light from the spots in the front are reflected by the user directly onto the semi-transparent surface. Whenever the user touches the panel, the hand produces a shadow that can be captured by the camera behind the wall.
Direct-touch paradigm
In our approach we tried to develop a setup that hides the whole technology from the end user. Using a pen is a very common and natural way to write or draw on a sheet of paper. Moving a page on a desk is usually done by hand, without using a pen. In order to follow this natural model, the INTOI application uses pen devices for sketching, while the infinite sized drawing area is panned and zoomed by hand gestures. Combining the described functionality to a powerful presentation tool is what makes our approach different from former digital whiteboards.
Back in September 2006, Autodesk introduced Autodesk Labs. One of the items on display was Project Freewheel (http://dwfit.com) – both a web-site where you can enter a DWF url for interactive viewing and a web-service that allows you to embed an interactive DWF viewer in your own HTML page.
Now, CADoogle (http://cadoogle.com/) uses the Autodesk Freewheel together with Google Search technology to display views of DWF files. Both 2D and 3D dwf data can be displayed, although it wasn’t exactly promising when the following error appeared when I was using it this morning.
An error occurred!
Error: SOAP-ENV:Server: Exception from service object: Daily limit of 1000 queries exceeded for key H/ufNfpQFHIXOhEAuGHVIRl59K66koWo
(But I guess it is still only a Beta version )
When it was working, I did a search for “Robot” and obtained 130 hits in a reported 0.03 seconds. There was a slight pause before the first 5 items appeared and here is the first hit. (Hint: Try it out in the frame below.)
Currently , the system will only search on keywords found in the name of the dwf files.
A special version is available for Mobile devices and you can use also use an RSS feed.
The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills to build and deploy RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) to the desktop.
Prior to the public beta, AIR was known as Apollo (Apollo).
AIR will be supported on Windows ( XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate) and OSX (10.4.8 and 10.4.9 Intel and PowerPC) and is targeted for release in the second half of 2007.
More details are available from the Adobe Labs web-site
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