Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
This paper presents an interactive apparatus to didactically explore Alberti's treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, as generative design systems, namely shape grammars. This apparatus allows users to interactively explore such architectonical knowledge in both appealing and informal ways, by enabling them to visualize and manipulate in real-time different design solutions. The authors identify the difficulties on encoding the architectural knowledge of a parametric design model into an interactive apparatus to be used by laypeople. At last, the authors discuss the results of a survey conducted to users that interacted with the prototype in order to assess its ability to communicate the knowledge of an architectural language.

Abstract
Three-dimensional virtual environments are present in many diffierent applications, being used even in small handheld devices. To navigate in these environments using such devices, most of current solutions rely on multi-touch interactions. However, previous works have already stated that multi-touch gestures on smartphones are not always feasible. In this work we present ThumbCam, a novel single-touch technique for camera manipulation on 3D virtual environments. With our solution, the user is able to move and look around and circle points of interest, while interacting using only his thumb. We compare ThumbCam with other state-of-the-art techniques, showing that it can offer more operations with a single touch. A qualitative user evaluation revealed that users found our solution appealing.

Abstract
Globalization has transformed engineering design into a world-wide endeavor pursued by geographically distributed specialist teams. Widespread adoption of VR for design and the need to act and place marks directly on the objects of discussion in design reviewing tasks led to research on annotations in virtual collaborative environments. However, conventional approaches have yet to progress beyond the yellow postit + text metaphor. Indeed, multimedia such as audio, sketches, video and animations afford greater expressiveness which could be put to good use in collaborative environments. Furthermore, individual annotations fail to capture both the rationale and flow of discussion which are key to understanding project design decisions. One exemplar instance is offshore engineering projects that normally engage geographically distributed highly-specialized engineering teams and require both improved productivity, due to project costs and the need to reducing risks when reviewing designs of deep-water oil & gas platforms. In this paper, we present an approach to rich, structured multimedia annotations to support the discussion and decision making in design reviewing tasks. Furthermore, our approach supports issue-based argumentation to reveal provenance of design decisions to better support the workflow in engineering projects. While this is an initial exploration of the solution space, examples show greater support of collaborative design review over traditional approaches. © The Eurographics Association 2014.

Abstract
Query specification for 3D object retrieval still relies on traditional interaction paradigms. The goal of our study was to identify the most natural methods to describe 3D objects, focusing on verbal and gestural expressions. Our case study uses LEGOR blocks. We started by collecting a corpus involving ten pairs of subjects, in which one participant requests blocks for building a model from another participant. This small corpus suggests that users prefer to describe 3D objects verbally, rarely resorting to gestures, and using them only as complement. The paper describes this corpus, addressing the challenges that such verbal descriptions create for a speech understanding system, namely the long complex verbal descriptions, involving dimensions, shapes, colors, metaphors, and diminutives. The latter connote small size, endearment or insignificance, and are only very common in informal language. In this corpus, they occurred in one out of seven requests. This experiment was the first step of the development of a prototype for searching LEGOR blocks combining speech and stereoscopic 3D. Although the verbal interaction in the first version is limited to relatively simple queries, its combination with immersive visualization allows the user to explore query results in a dataset with virtual blocks.