Forschungsthematik: Visual Computing http://www.vrvis.at daily 1 2008-12-19T09:31:55Z HILITE http://www.vrvis.at/projects/hilite HILITE - High Quality Lighting Simulation: A dynamic, interactive, realistic real-time lighting simulation for complex architectural environments The main focus of the HILITE project lies on the development of an advanced lighting simulation system, which allows real-time interactions in terms of movement and scene modification in order to provide a fast, dynamic and easy-to-use way to visualize new lighting concepts in architectural scenarios. The framework will make it possible to give users (and potential customers) a highly realistic and interactively modifiable preview of the illumination to expect inside and/or outside a building.

Changes in the scene (light sources, geometry, daytime …) lead to an immediate need for a recalculation of the illumination result. By using an iteratively improving approach on modern GPU hardware, which converges to the physically correct solution after several hundred frames, scene interactions are still made possible during these costly computations – even in cases of a large number of physically complex light sources.


The developed system will make it possible to visualize the simulation results on both regular monitors as well as on 3D stereo setups with multiple screens, providing an immersive impression of the illuminated buildings. By applying an interactive graphical user interface, it will be both possible to modify light source settings (like position, type, color and intensity) and scene geometry attributes (like textures or object positions/orientation), offering on-the-fly changes in scene and light simulation configuration.

]]> No publisher Michael Schwaerzler Rendering Industry 2011-06-01T13:40:00Z Projekt VKT-GOEPL http://www.vrvis.at/projects/vkt-goepl Validation of concepts and technologies towards a shared public and private situation report When planning and preparing for disaster scenarios such as earthquakes, floods or epidemics, it is essential to provide a shared view of the effects on a wide variety of aspects. Depending on the scenario, this may for example include the affected general population as well as public infrastructure, private service providers, storage and processing facilities of hazardous materials.

Such information may come from a wide variety of sources, such as government institutions or private service providers.

This project researched concepts and technologies that shall facilitate the communication, collection and processing of this information, especially in a geospatial context. Two of the key requirements were an open design to accommodate a large variety of data with a straightforward workflow for integration within the system, and a shared workspace for all participating agencies.

To demonstrate and validate the candidate technologies, a prototype demonstrator system was built and used in two simulated scenarios. The feedback from these full-day events was then used to refine the design of the system.

The system was designed as a web based architecture for easy deployment and shared access. Shared messaging, task management, full-text searchable document storage and other collaboration functions supported closed-group communication on sensitive topics; a powerful map display and visualization module became the main component for the visualization and exploration of task-relevant geospatial information.

A simple administration user interface allows non-experts to enrich the database using standard geospatial and office file formats (ESRI Shapefile, PDF, Word and Excel documents, etc.), select subsets of the available information for display and perform other routine maintenance tasks.

Several design iterations led to a system that utilizes an open, document-oriented backend database architecture based on MongoDB, which can easily accommodate arbitrarily structured information (even within single collections), allows easy updating and extension of stored entities, and supports replication and clustering for a scalable and reliable system. To allow highly efficient geospatial queries, a PostGIS front-end database caches the stored entities and natively supports a wide range of geospatial queries and calculations.

Thanks to recent advances in HTML5 and JavaScript performance, significant parts of the system could be implemented to run inside the web browser, including a flexible map display component based on OpenLayers, geospatial queries and interactive visualization overlays. Therefore, the system requires essentially no client-side installation (except for a recent browser), facilitating deployment in secure environments, and is highly scalable.

]]> No publisher Stephan Mantler 2011-01-25T11:09:00Z Projekt Interactive Planning http://www.vrvis.at/projects/interactive-planning In the applied research project Interactive Planning VRVis and its company partners are building a new real-time visualization system for large infrastructure projects and other geospatial applications. In addition to high performance and realistic display, research challenges include a streamlined workflow from traditional GIS systems and other input data, the inclusion of dynamic scene elements (such as autonomous vehicles that automatically populate roads and railways), and simplified access to advanced shader functionality without the need for expert knowledge. Large infrastructure projects are often challenging for interactive visualizations. The source data is typically either overwhelmingly detailed, or too coarse for realistic real-time rendering. In this project, new methods are being investigated for handling very large scenes and for ingesting and processing geospatial data and creating realistic representations from typical GIS input data.

In addition, GIS metadata can also be used to populate virtual environments with autonomous vehicles, control geometry creation and provide valuable additional information (such as noise levels in highway simulations) to the viewer. The prototype viewer has already been used for various public audits and presentations, and has been generally recognized as a valuable tool in these situations.

]]> No publisher Stephan Mantler 2011-01-25T10:40:00Z Projekt INFOSAW http://www.vrvis.at/projects/infosaw Systems for the surveillance of tunnels utilize various sensor data to inform operators in case of emergency situations. In many disaster scenarios, however, avalanches of alarm messages are generated within a short time. This makes it difficult or even impossible for operators to maintain an overview of the situation and to react appropriately. The goal of the project INFOSAW is to significantly increase the situation awareness of operators even in disaster scenarios by providing a system that combines intelligent data processing with innovative visualization techniques. No publisher Harald Piringer Visual Analysis 2011-01-12T17:30:00Z Projekt Semantic Steering http://www.vrvis.at/projects/semantic-steering The project Semantic Steering targets a novel integrated steering system called "Visdom" to support the user in the decision making process. The developed concepts enable users to interact with a remote simulation system based on their understanding and to examine alternative scenarios in a short period of time. This is accomplished by combining simulation and visualization into a single, modular and extensible environment.  

Mission: To support time-critical decision making using visual simulation control.

Fluid simulation tools are capable of predicting natural processes and can be employed for the assistance in the human decision making process. Existing solutions lack a number of important features needed for a feasible support system. Very important is the usability of the simulation tools by people without special fluid simulation expertise. Moreover, with the capabilities of graphics hardware clusters, everybody will have access to affordable supercomputing power on their desktop. Until now, little work has been done to use this power for knowledge generation via simulation steering. In this project we develop a novel computational steering system that uses visualization in every aspect of the problem solving and provides effective feedback via an intuitive interface.

Among the application areas of the system we consider the industrial design of components where rapid prototyping is required. Using a fast and intuitive system will help to evaluate whether a certain concept is promising during the design phase. Another important application is the assistance in emergency situations that are caused by natural disasters such as floods, where safety and damage limitation depend on fast decisions. The system can be used to test actions to be taken during a flood event . Users interact with sketch-based steering monitors to quickly plan and design a breach closure, to name an example. The gained knowledge supports the creation of flood management plans. Finally, our vision is that, even under time-critical circumstances, emergency personnel on-site will be able to analyze the imminent situation quickly to choose the best response strategy.

World Lines are introduced as an intuitive representation of multiple simulation runs. This concept allows to create, manage and compare alternative scenarios with the goal to understand the complex interplay between simulation input parameters and simulation outcome. The underlying data-flow network enables a flexible integration of simulation, visualization and steering components into a single application. This way, we can adapt several existing simulation modules and integrate them. Visdom comprises a client-server architecture to prepare for the future vision of decision support on-site using mobile devices. The compute-intensive parts are written as server modules controlled over the web. Visdom exploits fast GPU technology for high-performance simulation, analysis and visualization.

 

Links

Visdom Website

 

Visdom Screenshots

Visdom: Design of a breach closure

Intuitive design of a breach closure using semantic steering monitors (top views) that are linked to World Lines (bottom view). The interactive World Lines view represents alternative choices (multiple related simulation runs) as a set of causally connected tracks.

 

Visdom: Comparative visual analysis of a dam break data set

Comparative visual analysis of a loaded dam break data set.

 

Visdom: A steerable, integrated visualization system

Visdom is a modular system allowing the combination of multiple steering monitors or views for comparative analysis of alternative scenarios.

]]> No publisher Juergen Waser Visualization 2011-01-10T16:15:00Z Projekt VICEWORK http://www.vrvis.at/projects/vicework The project VICEWORK will research how to make interactive visual analysis a core concept integrating different steps of workflows. The overall objective is to significantly reduce time (and thus costs) for selected tasks of the involved company partners as compared to current workflows. The project addresses five scientific research topics: 1) analyzing families of functions with complex characteristics, 2) an integrated tool chain, 3) a situation-sensitive user interface, 4) decision making in collaborative workshops, 5) and a tight integration of statistical and visual approaches. Interactive visualization has proven to be an appropriate technology for a flexible and human-centric approach to data analysis in a wide range of applications. However, there is still no adoption of this technology on a large scale in some application domains that could benefit significantly. The main goal of the project VICEWORK is to bridge the gap between powerful interactive visualization concepts like linking+brushing and focus+context, and the daily needs of users to fulfill particular tasks. These tasks are closely related to the application domains of the participating company partners.

For AVL, this is providing a tool chain for supporting the development of powertrain systems. In this context, a key task is the optimization of engine designs by analyzing multiple simulations runs as issued for different points of a multi-dimensional parameter space. For Plasmo, a key task is the efficient quality assessment of welding seams that have been manufactured for different conditions over time. For fas.research, an important task is to support the process of deriving decisions and actions from impact matrices as defined in collaborative workshops.

In all cases, visualization is necessary to provide insight into complex data. Moreover, workflows play an important role in all these tasks. Interactive visual analysis has the potential to significantly improve these workflows as a core concept for integrating different steps and tools. The business value of the project VICEWORK is to significantly increase the efficiency for performing essential tasks. Besides time, another benefit is to facilitate testing “what if” scenarios, which should encourage users to try solutions that would otherwise remain untested in many cases and thus to improve the ultimate quality of results. Finally, we expect that offering interactive visualization as a technology that goes far beyond standard user-interfaces and static graphics will become an important selling argument of the companies for their products.

From a scientific point of view, adapting interactive visualization to be applicable to complex real-world tasks is a major topic in the field of Visual Analytics. Finding a good trade-off between flexibility and complexity, scalability and performance, powerful novel visualization techniques and acceptance by experienced users is a challenging field of research that involves know-how from visualization, human computer interaction, cognitive sciences, statistics, and application-specific domain knowledge. In addition to these high-level goals, the project also addresses various specific open research questions, e.g., the analysis of families of function graphs with complex characteristics as shown in the image. Many of these questions arise in different application contexts, which explains the benefit of the multi-firm nature of this project. For example, comparing results for different input parameters is an issue that arises in the context of all three industry partners.

]]> No publisher Harald Piringer Visual Analysis 2010-12-29T12:05:00Z Projekt IVAN http://www.vrvis.at/projects/ivan IVAN is a strategic research project in the area Visual Analysis. As such, IVAN seeks to ensure and strategically extend the degree of innovation of the technology in the next few years. In particular, research in IVAN addresses four main topics: 1) an uncertainty-aware exploration of continuous parameter spaces using multivariate prediction, 2) a generalization of interactive data derivation, 3) a comparative visualization of many categories, and 4) a visual analysis of many relational data tables.  

Visual analysis has become a scientifically and economically important field. Multiple publications, a powerful software framework, and a growing number of related industry projects show that visual analysis is a key competence of VRVis. Building on this competence and technology, the strategic research project IVAN has two high-level goals: First, it seeks to address challenging research topics which further increase the visibility of visual analysis research of VRVis. Second, it will ensure the high degree of innovation of the visual analysis-related software technology of VRVis for the next few years.


IVAN addresses four concrete topics of research which have evolved as strategically relevant in discussions with both science and industry.

  1. The first topic addresses the exploration of continuous parameter spaces using multivariate prediction. Based on statistical methods, we envision to enable a local analysis of continuous, sampled parameter spaces and a prediction of quantitative target values in real-time. Novel visualization techniques will provide guidance for an efficient navigation to interesting regions of continuous parameter spaces and a local sensitivity analysis with respect to multiple parameters (see also the image). Another aspect concerns the visualization of the inherent uncertainty of predictions considering the different sources of uncertainty for different prediction methods.
  2. The second topic focuses on the generalization of data derivation as a powerful approach to coordinate multiple views. Today, data derivation is typically a static part of pre-processing. On the other hand, certain types of data derivation (e.g., interactive selection by brushing) have tightly been integrated in the analysis but are not general with respect to interaction and visualization concepts. We intend to describe a general model for interactive data derivation that seeks to combine two goals: 1) the specification of data derivation should be tightly integrated in the analysis process, and 2) the results should be handled as flexibly as possible. Based on an implementation of the model within visplore, we envision many applications that could benefit from a generalized approach, including similarity-based analysis, interactive data editing, and advanced aggregations of time-dependent data.
  3. The third topic is dedicated to a comparative visualization of many categories. Many current visualization approaches for analyzing categorical data rely on side-by-side comparison in small-multiple visualizations. While a small-multiple layout will also be the starting point of our approach, we intend to exceed the capabilities of current approaches in two important aspects: first, the envisioned approach should be tightly coupled to all other views, including multiple instances of itself. Our second goal is to explicitly visualize the difference of each plot with respect to a reference plot for common visualization types like bar charts, scatter plots, time series, and box plots. We expect such comparisons to be more precise than side-by-side comparisons in the case of many categories.
  4. The fourth topic deals with the visual analysis of many relational data tables. A relational data model is widely used in databases and data warehouses. On the other hand, many visualizations are limited to represent the data in terms of the raw data records that constitute one imported data table at a time. We intend to enable a simultaneous analysis of multiple relational data tables in visplore by linking views that refer to different tables. Another goal is to provide an overview of a database comprising many relational data tables, and to support to defining new pivot tables in an ad-hoc manner.

The work on these topics includes the conceptualization, prototype implementation within the system visplore, and the evaluation of results. Moreover, IVAN involves the scientific dissemination of results and scientific networking as well as the supervision of students.

 

]]> No publisher Harald Piringer Visual Analysis 2010-12-29T11:10:00Z Projekt Tactile Paintings http://www.vrvis.at/projects/tactile-paintings Das Ziel dieses Projekts ist, einen Workflow zur Umwandlung von Gemälden in taktile Repräsentationen für Museumsführungen zu entwickeln. Zweidimensionale Kunst, ursprünglich für sehende Menschen gemacht, soll somit auch für blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen erlebbar werden. Der Fokus liegt dabei darauf, den Künstler so weit wie möglich beim Umwandlungsprozess durch geeignete computerunterstützte Methoden zu unterstützen, und die Produktion mittels Rapid-Prototyping zu vereinfachen. Unsere Galerien sind voll wunderbarer Gemälde, manche so berühmt, dass diese fast jeder kennt. Blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen sind leider fast gänzlich aus dieser Welt der visuellen Künsten ausgeschlossen. Einige Museen bieten spezielle Führungen an, in denen ausgewählte Gemälde verbal beschrieben werden. Es ist jedoch sehr schwierig, sich ein mentales Bild alleine von akustischen Eindrücken zu verschaffen. Etablierte Taktile Diagramme (stilisierte Versionen von Gemälden, meist Liniengraphiken in Papier geprägt) vermögen zwar einen Überblick zu vermitteln, liefern aber nur einen sehr vereinfachten Eindruck. Handgemachte Relief-Plastiken auf der anderen Seite sind sehr detailliert und gut zu erfühlen, den vollständig manuellen Umsetzungsprozess können aber nur ausgebildete, begabte Bildhauer durchführen. Wir wollten einen Prozess, für den man keine speziellen, manuellen Fähigkeiten benötigt, und der die Umwandlung in unterschiedliche, möglichst originalgetreue, taktile Repräsentationen adequater Komplexität erlaubt.

 

Im momentanen Stand des Projektes haben wir einen computerunterstützten Prozess eintwickelt, der Bilder in drei, unterschiedlich komplexe, taktile Medien umwandelt. Dieser Prozess besteht aus drei aufeinanderfolgenden Stufen. Am Ende jeder Stufe sind jeweils die Daten für die Produktion eines taktilen Mediums verfügbar.

In der ersten Stufe werden wichtige Strukturen identifiziert, wobei Liniengrafiken entstehen, die die Bilder in semantisch sinnvolle Einheiten separieren. Diese Zeichnungen, vektorisiert und mit verschiedenen Füllmustern verdeutlicht, können für Taktile Diagramme verwendet werden.

Die zweite Stufe fügt Tiefe hinzu, etwas das ein sehr wichtiger Bestandteil in den meisten figurativen Gemälden ist. Das menschliche Auge ist trainiert diese versteckte dritte Dimension zu dekodieren, während der taktile Sinn bereits dreidimensionalen Input erwartet. Ein eigens entwickeltes, intuitives User Interface erlaubt es dem Künstler schnell Tiefenrelationen einzuzeichnen. Die Software weist dann jedem Objekt eine passende Tiefe automatisch zu. Das resultierende, diskrete Tiefenbild wird in Schichten konvertiert, die aus flexiblen Kunststofffolien mittels Laser-Cutter geschnitten, und aufeinander geklebt werden. Es entstehen sogenannte "Layered Depth Diagramme".

In der dritten Stufe wird Texturinformation aus den Gemälden mit einstellbaren Filtern extrahiert (ähnlich zu Verarbeitungsschritten im menschlichen Auge) und über die Layered Depth Diagramme gelegt. Die dadurch entstehenden "Texturierten Reliefs" können mit computergesteuerten CNC-Fräsmaschinen hergestellt werden. Es dauert mehrere Stunden, bis die feinen Fräser alle feinen Details herausgearbeitet haben. Es musste eigene Software zum Erzeugen der Maschinen-Codes entwickelt werden, da keine erhältliche CAM-Software diese hochdetaillierten Daten bearbeiten konnte. Von einem Negativabdruck können dann mehrere Kopien gegossen werden. Etliche Materialien wurden getestet, bis ein strapazierfähigs, schmutzabweisends und angenehmes Material gefunden wurde.

 

Das Projekt wurde in Kooperation mit dem Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien durchgeführt und von KulturKontakt Austria im Auftrag des BMUKK gefördert. Vier Texturierte Reliefs von drei Gemälden mit Begleitbroschüre in Brailleschrift sind bis jetzt verfügbar, und Spezial-Führungen werden angeboten.

 

Videos

 

Links

 

Publikationen/Talks

  • A. Reichinger, M. Neumüller, F. Rist, S. Maierhofer, W. Purgathofer. "Computer-Aided Design of Tactile Models - Taxonomy and Case Studies". In Miesenberger, K., Karshmer, A., Penaz, P., Zagler, W., eds.: Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Volume XXX of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2012) (to be published). PDF
  • A. Reichinger, S. Maierhofer, and W. Purgathofer. High-Quality Tactile Paintings. ACM J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 4, 2, Article 5 (November 2011), 13 pages. DOI = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2037820.2037822. PDF
  • A. Reichinger, S. Maierhofer, W. Purgathofer, High-Quality Tactile Paintings. In Eurographics 2011 - Areas Papers, April 2011, pp. 1-8 (PDF).
  • A. Reichinger, Gallery Paintings for Blind and Visually Impaired People, Talk at SpaceX - An Exchange Forum on Information Design for Visually Impaired People, Vienna, October 25-26, 2010.


Awards

Präsentationen

 

Presse, Berichte, TV

 

Beispiele

Raffael, "Madonna im Grünen", 1505 oder 1506.

KHM Bilddatenbank

Liniendiagramm und Layered Depth Diagram zu Detail von Raffaels Madonna im Grünen, 1505 oder 1506.

Liniendiagramm und Layered Depth Diagram.

Textured Relief zu Raffaels Madonna im Grünen, 1505 oder 1506.

Textured Relief.

Textured Relief zu Detail von Raffaels Madonna im Grünen, 1505 oder 1506.

Textured Relief zu Detail-Vergrößerung.

 

Jean Fouquet, "Der ferraresische Hofnarr Gonella", um 1445.

KHM Bilddatenbank

Tactile Paintings: Textured Relief zu Jean Fouquets, Der ferraresische Hofnarr Gonella, um 1445.

Textured Relief

 

Albrecht Dürer, "Maria mit Kind", 1512 datiert.

KHM Bilddatenbank

Textured Relief zu Albrecht Dürers, Maria mit Kind, 1512 datiert.

Textured Relief.

]]> No publisher Andreas Reichinger Rendering Computer Vision 2010-11-19T14:30:00Z Projekt VILMA http://www.vrvis.at/projects/vilma High Resolution Mappang and Visualization of Linear Structures: Together with industry partners the increase in safety through visualization for linear infrastructure is researched VILMA is a framework for the mapping and visualization of linear structures such as roads, railway lines, traffic tunnels, water tunnels, airport runways, channels, and pipelines. It unifies a moving data acquisition platform with on-line visualization to keep data acquisition costs and duration low. It incorporates a processing chain for high-resolution surface mapping to cope with future quality standards in surveying and quality engineering. And it emphasizes on the interactive visualization to allow efficient access to the mapping results, managing data of different epochs. 


VILMA consists of a dynamic vision -- sensor setup (e.g. digital cameras, laser scan, thermal imaging), aiming at a geo-referenced data acquisition speed of 1 km / hour in minimum and a mapping resolution of better than 1 mm specifically at on-line selected regions of interest such as cracks or water ingress in tunnels. During data acquisition, on-site visualisation is a major development issue to efficiently guide the operator and immediately assess data usability and quality. The different sensor data is co-registered, geo-referenced, and integrated into a hierarchical surface representation for efficient access to layers of different resolution, thematic content, stage of data processing, and spatial as well as temporal information such as data acquisition time, deformation dynamics, or construction progress. Visualization issues cover the user-friendly real-time random 2D access to surface layers, and a typical set of 3D visualization functions that fulfils the operational and quality needs of the construction and maintenance site. To demonstrate the sustainable VILMA application potential some highly relevant quality management and cost aspects are addressed such as crack detection and evaluation, requirements from geology, and frequent monitoring. The system is scalable in terms of sensor setup, processing complexity and visualization hardware performance. The integration of external sensor data like handheld camera images, the practicability of each system component, assessed by the user, and the awareness to up-to-date 2D & 3D visualization developments are important development drivers. 


VILMA integrates challenging aspects of vision sensor design, 3D reconstruction, recognition, and visualization. The proposing partners unify application awareness, long-term experience in the related scientific topics and proven success of recent joint developments.

 

]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl Rendering 2009-07-15T13:00:00Z Projekt IRIS http://www.vrvis.at/projects/iris IRIS is a EU-funded project with 40 internatonal partners with the goal to increase the safety and security of industrial systems. Current practices in risk assessment and management for industrial systems are characterized by its methodical diversity and fragmented approaches. In retrospect these risk and safety paradigms resulted from diverse industries driven and limited by available knowledge and technologies. A change based on industry driven R&D work is needed.

At present the European Industry recognised their obligation to reconsider risk and safety policies, having a more competitive industry and more risk informed and innovation accepting society in vision. Therefore the large collaborative project IRIS is proposed to identify, quantify and mitigate existing and emerging risks to create societal cost-benefits, to increase industrial safety and to reduce impact on human health and environment.

The project is led and driven by industry to consolidate and generate knowledge and technologies which enable the integration of new safety concepts related to technical, human, organizational and cultural aspects. The partnership represents over 1 million workers. The project integrates all aspects of industrial safety with some priority on saving human lives prior cost reductions and is particular underpinning relevant EU policies.

 

]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl Rendering 2009-07-15T12:50:00Z Projekt SemSeg http://www.vrvis.at/projects/semseg It is the objective of this project to research a new segmentation method for unsteady flows that has the elegance and specificity of (steady) VFT, but which provides correct results for unsteady flows as well. The thorough analysis of flows plays an important role in many different processes, such as airplane and car design, environmental research, and medicine.  Scientific Visualization and its subfield flow visualization have provided a variety of techniques for the domain experts to visually analyze large and complex flow data sets.  Among them, so-called topology-based methods play an important role.  Vector field topology (VFT) is a mathematically rigorous theory that reveals the essential structure of a static vector field.  However, this approach is only fully valid for static vector fields.

Recent developments in the target domains of this project show a clear transition from steady to unsteady flow scenarios.  Accordingly, we have to see that the traditionally proven approaches do not apply any more and that a conceptual change in the methodology of visual analysis is necessary.  Topology-based methods which account for the complete dynamic behaviour of flow fields are strongly needed but do not exist.  Steps toward this goal have been done from several sides, delivering promising but yet only partial results.

It is the objective of this project to research a new segmentation method for unsteady flows that has the elegance and specificity of (steady) VFT, but which provides correct results for unsteady flows as well.  This project aims at the formulation of a sound theoretical mechanism to describe structural features in time-dependent flow.  Similar to the case of steady flow, were topology has proven its usefulness in many years, it is straight-forward to expect that the new approach will also establish its important role in the analysis and discussion of time-dependent flow scenarios.  As part of a successful project, concrete algorithms to extract and visualize the topological structures are derived from the new mechanism.  Implementations of them will allow studying the usefulness on a number of real-life flow data from different areas of application.

]]> No publisher Stefan Schmied Visualization 2009-04-01T11:30:00Z Projekt GeoVis http://www.vrvis.at/projects/geovis Processing, Visualization and Presentation of Raw Geometric Data The first main goal of the project is a setup to visualize relevant data during a tunnel construction or relevant data within a city model. In order to navigate the available geometry and measurement data, raw laser scan data needs to be pre-processed and prepared for hardware optimized rendering. Developing the necessary geometry processing algorithms for preparing this and other kinds of huge amounts of raw discrete geometry for both rendering and engineering tasks constitutes the second major goal. Furthermore all geometric data is geo-referenced. This ensures the ability to combine different data layers. Although, a number of off-the-shelf solutions for individual components of the workflow in this project exist, no integrated solution has been demonstrated. In the process of combining solutions from strategic research additional problems will arise, that have not been addressed before.

]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl 2009-01-13T15:45:00Z Projekt MIIVIS http://www.vrvis.at/projects/miivis Medical Visualization: One of the current trends in medical and industrial imaging is the combination of nD images of different imaging devices and the direct extraction of spatio-temporal or structural multidimensional information to get a more complete picture of a certain object. Two main challenges still unsolved in available commercial software can be identified in this context and will be addressed in this project: (a) A high amount of image data requires accurate and automatic task, object, and device specific information extraction. This problem isonly solved for very specific diagnostic tasks, and existing solutions are not flexible enough to be directly applied to future problems. (b) The multidimensional character of information requires the development of appropriate visualization methods. This project aims at reacting on ongoing technological and methodological developments in image based diagnostic tasks with focus on healthcare and industrial imaging by providing made-to-measure solutions for highly automatic analysis and visualization of n-dimensional medical and industrial images.

 

 

MIIVIS will be primarily linked to the ENGVIS project, benefiting from all visualization and analysis approaches dealing with large and 3D data. Especially the linking of techniques from scientific visualization with information visualization will also play an important role in future applications dealing with large volumetric data from numerous sources.]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl Visualization Computer Vision 2008-12-22T12:15:00Z Projekt Industrial CT Data http://www.vrvis.at/projects/industrial-ct-data Exploration and Quantification of Industrial CT Data: Non-destructive testing (NDT) is a scientific discipline that examines the internal structures of industrial components such as machine parts and cast metal, ceramic and compound materials, as well as plastics, without destroying them. The use of 3D computed tomography (CT) is becoming more and more important in this area, since it enables powerful new possibilities for inspection, quantification, and quality assessment of components and materials. The goal of this project is to enable expert users in NDT to exploit this potential through novel advanced visualization and quantification techniques. In addition to X-Ray radiography, the use of 3D computed tomography in NDT has created powerful new possibilities, but also new challenges for the inspection and testing process. Industrial CT volumes are generally quite large, which leads to several hundred MB to one or more GB of raw data per scan, which need to be processed, visualized, and analyzed interactively in order to enable an efficient workflow for the expert user. Real-time volume rendering has become an essential tool for visualizing industrial volumes. However, for NDT practitioners visualization is just one part of the workflow, which includes a variety of processing tasks such as defect detection and quantification, computing statistical measures and properties such as material porosity, performing accurate measurements and comparisons, and many more. We work in cooperation with the Austrian Foundry Research Institute (ÖGI) with the goal to explore industrial CT volumes in order to facilitate the important processes of quantification and quality assessment in a fully interactive, visualization-driven manner. These approaches are not limited to cast metal parts, but are also applicable to other materials like concrete, wood, asphalt, plastics, ceramics, and composite materials.

]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl Visualization 2008-12-22T11:55:00Z Projekt Virtual Design Process http://www.vrvis.at/projects/virtual-design-process In car interior design, a huge number of design cycles and material variations is necessary until a final design is settled. Our goal is to reduce the number and duration of these cycles by visualizing the final material fabric (woven or knit) and leather - at a very early stage of the design process. This visualization is integrated in an interactive 3D user interface that enables rapid design decisions and modifications based on these decisions. The developed system will be used for material creation (textiles and leather), the design of the covering process and the design of the geometry of seats and car interiors. It can also serve as interface to the customer, by using the system to display different design versions directly within the model provided by the customer.

The image to the right shows the installed Virtual Design prototype at Eybl International in Krems.

The setup consists of a stereo front-projection system, using polarizing filters to achieve a 3D output on the large screen in the middle of the picture. The two projectors visible on the upper border have been selected to provide high resolution and faithful color reproduction. A distributed approach allows the control of the visualization from one PC the notebook on the right while the rendering is performed independently on a second PC.]]> No publisher Georg Rothwangl Rendering Computer Vision 2008-12-22T09:44:05Z Projekt