A general purpose cave-like system for visualization of animated and 4D cad modeling

Abstract

In the last decade, virtual reality (VR) systems have been used to enhance the visualization of CAD projects. The immersive VR techniques allow to the designer interacting and modeling in a more intuitive and efficient way. Current 4D and animated simulation CAD tools are a new challenge for immersive visualization. In this paper we propose a general purpose cave-like system that enables interactive visualization of 4D and animated CAD models. In an automated way, the system is able to treat static and dynamic 3D environments, allowing to share the experience of navigation in the scene among the users, even geographically distributed. The collaborative immersive multiprojection visualization approach has basically four modules for modeling, converting, visualizing and interacting. Besides the system had be designed and implemented for visualization of CAD models, it can be used for general purposes thanks to the use of a XML-based format on the visualization module. The system proposed is validated through a case-study using dynamic 3D models created on digital manufacturing softwares of Shipbuilding and Offshore Industries.