Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1-1-2005 Augmented reality tangible interfaces for CAD design review Ronald Sidharta Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Recommended Citation Sidharta, Ronald, "Augmented reality tangible interfaces for CAD design review" (2005). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 20909. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/20909 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Augmented reality tangible interfaces for CAD design review by Ronald Sidharta A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Major: Human Computer Interaction Program of Study Committee: Adrian Sannier (Co-major Professor) Carolina Cruz-Neira (Co-major Professor) Dirk Reiners Ying Cai Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2005 Copyright © Ronald Sidharta, 2005. All rights reserved. 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of Ronald Sidharta has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Signatures have been redacted for privacy 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ iv MOTIVATION ....................................................................................................................... 1 CAD'S ADVANTAGE AND EVOLUTION .............................................................................................. 1 RESEARCH PROBLEM ......................................................................................................................... 5 RELATED RESEARCH ...................................................................................................... 10 TANGIBLE USER INTERFACE ....................................................................... ..................................... 10 Advantages of Tangible User Interface (TUI) ............................................................................................ 15 AUGMENTED REALITY ..................................................................................................................... 17 Augmented Reality For Collaborative Work ............................................................. ................................. 19 AUGMENTED TANGIBLE INTERFACE ................................................................................................ 21 IMPLEMENTA TI0 N .......................................................................................................... 24 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE ................................................................................................................. 24 GENERAL SYSTEM OVERVIEW ......................................................................................................... 24 Computer ....................... ... ............................................... .................. ..................... .................................... 25 HMD ........................................................................................................................................................... 26 Camera and Microphone ............................................................................................................................. 27 IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS ............................................................................................................. 28 Image Analyzer ........................................................................................................................................... 29 Speech Module ........................................................................................................................................... 33 Scene Graph Module ................................................................................................................................... 34 Interaction Module ................................................................. ..................................................................... 36 Inter-A TI Interactions ................................................................................................................................. 43 DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................ 54 3 D Browsing ............................................................................................................................................... 54 3D Positioning/Orientation .................................................................... ..................................................... 54 3D Assembly/Disassembly ......................................................................................................................... 55 HCI CONSIDERATIONS ..................................................................................................................... 56 Augmented Reality Feasibility .................................................................................................................... 56 Tangible User Interface Feasibility ............................................................................................................. 63 FUTURE W 0 RKS ................................................................................................................ 68 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 70 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. 73 lV ABSTRACT Today's engineering design is an iterative process. It is a process with many cascading effects; a change in one facet of a design often has effects that ripple throughout the rest of the process. It is also a difficult process, one that requires the close cooperation of people from a variety of different backgrounds and training. Creating designs digitally has allowed engineers and designers to harness the processing power of computers to help them create, manipulate, update, and distribute designs faster and more efficiently than traditional, paper-based process. Today's designers and engineers rely on Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) programs to help them finish a design efficiently and accurately, reducing cost and increasing productivity in the midst of increasing competition. 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. Collaborative work has become an increasingly crucial aspect of engineering design, as teams grow larger and more diverse, spread across different locations, ever around the world. This increasing emphasis on collaboration requires new tools to facilitate design v reviews among team members with differing backgrounds. The diversity of training requires that these new collaborative tools be transparent, with little or no learning curve required of their casual users. Consider the members of a modem design team as they meet to determine if there is a conflict between two mechanical parts that join together as part of a design. In this typical design review scenario, with today's tools, a group of several users might find themselves crowded together in front of a computer desktop, while a designated, trained operator runs the CAD system to show the group the design of the mating parts. The complexity of the CAD system's interface forms a barrier to the design, preventing the active participation of the team members. Communication is bottlenecked by the operator, restricting the flow of ideas. 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. A TI uses augmented reality techniques to allow a computer to recognize a set of tangible objects and generate virtual graphics