Virtual reality (VR) modeling has been used for years in various industries, including the automotive sector. But most of the applications were neglecting the effects of lightning. In "Getting the Feel of Virtual Reality," IST Results, a EU organization, says that RealReflect, a project started in 2002 at several European universities, is about to change this. It uses "a new image acquisition technique known as Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) that captures the look and feel of different materials." The system handles both lighting and viewing direction and can acquire and render very subtle textures in VR environments. With previous VR modeling applications, you could see the results as believable. But, according to the researchers, with RealReflect, you think the model is real. The system has been targeted for the automotive industry, but could be used for other applications, such as architecture design or computer games. Read more...
Here are the opening paragraphs of the article.
A giant leap forward in the realism of virtual reality (VR) may be just around the corner as a team of European researchers near the completion of a pioneering project to add textures, lighting effects and 'feel' to computer-generated 3D models.
Launched in 2002, the RealReflect project was the first attempt to use a new image acquisition technique known as Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) that captures the look and feel of different materials. When this IST programme funded-project ends this October it is expected to result in the first comprehensive application using BTF for industrial modelling.
Researchers are pretty enthusiast about the new system.
"RealReflect is a major advancement over traditional virtual reality modelling, which basically relies on simplifications of reality by describing optical properties of a surface by a 2D matrix of data that does not show the real effects of lighting," explains project coordinator Attila Neumann at the Technical University of Vienna. "Traditional virtual reality modelling, despite its name, lacks the feeling of reality and is a poor representation of it because the way things look highly depends on how they are illuminated and from what direction they are being viewed."
Below is a rendering of the complete exterior of a Mercedes C-Class: "Taken directly from the VR-System, this screenshot shows the standard rendering subproduct using environment mapping (Credit: RealReflect).
You'll find other screenshots, demos and a movie in the Media & Downloads Library section.
Because RealReflect takes into account both lighting and viewing direction, it is able to acquire and render in VR even the most subtle textures. But there is the price to pay: the system generates lots of data.
In order to be able to realistically represent textures the system requires a thousand times more data than other VR modelling tools, leading the project partners to develop compression techniques for the BTF information. The compression allows the models to be viewed and worked on in real time.
If the models created with RealReflect can feel like real cars, is this the end of prototypes?
"When a car company wants to make a new model around 50 prototypes of different designs are built, of those most will be rejected before the company reaches the final stage of choosing a model from maybe five examples," the coordinator says. "With RealReflect there would be no need to produce 50 physical prototypes as they could be created and viewed virtually, requiring maybe only five or 10 real prototypes or even less to be produced."
Besides cost savings and reduced times to market a new model, RealReflect can be used for other purposes.
Besides displaying in detail the look of the vehicle, the system could also enhance safety by allowing designers to see the way different types of illumination reflect off its surfaces. This could, for example, allow designers to reduce potentially dangerous reflections on the windshield that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Beyond the automotive sector, the RealReflect system could also be applied to architecture, allowing architects to better visualise the appearance of materials used in construction, while offering clients the opportunity to virtually tour a building.
Today, the project partners have not yet decided how the system will be put on the market. But as the EU financial funding will stop in October 2005, they have to decide pretty soon if RealReflect will be sold as a full application or as individual components targeting different industries.
Sources: IST Results, April 27, 2005; and RealReflect website
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