Madrid ACM SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter

Virtual prototyping is one of the most exciting burgeoning fields in recent years. At today, designers can build a virtual prototype with CAD (Computer Aided Design), can analyse its mechanical behaviour with FEM and can design also its manufacturing process with CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing). The limit of this approach is that all these tools are focused on designers. User centered design is a very popular approach to design that attempts to actively involve the end users in the design process to help ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable. In this scenario, a new research branch in the field of Virtual Prototyping Methodologies could be investigated, with the aim of developing some techniques to involve the users during the design activities (like usability test of industrial products). The main goal of my research is to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) environment integrated with haptics devices, in which the designer and/or user can virtually interact, in a multi-sensorial way, with the interface of a virtual product.

In this talk, I will describe the development of the AR environment focusing on mathematical, software and hardware framework. The most common solution to implement an AR system is based on the use of an Head Mounted Display (HMD) and two cameras for the stereoscopic video see-through visualization, but almost all the AR systems presented in literature employ one camera to obtain a marker based video-tracking. I'll present an innovative tracking solution based on a stereo vision approach which aims to use the information coming from both cameras in order to improve tracking accuracy. The proposed solution is also able to switch itself into a standard single camera visual tracking when the stereo pair correspondence is missing.