Interactive Visualisation and Virtual Reality

The research focuses on all aspects of interactive exploration of large and complex datasets, such as interaction, Virtual Reality, large data handling and the development of new VR hardware. Much of our work and VR hardware is concentrated in the Virtual Reality Laboratory. See the VRLab page and the latest news and events.

All relevant publications can be browsed by following the publications link, or visit our Youtube Channel.

Examples

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Molecular Dynamics & Visualisation

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Simulation and Exploration of Atmospheric effects

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Overview of VR hardware

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Interactive Visualization of 3D topographic data

Latest News

(for older news in this category, see our wordpress news page)

Memorial of the 1953 North Sea Flood

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:58:12 +0000

A discussion round on Wednesday 30th February was held in the TU Delft Science Center regarding the memorial of the North Sea Flood in 1953. 60 years ago, in the night of 31st January to the 1st February, a large flood hit the southern provinces of the Netherlands (Zeeland, South Holland and parts of Brabant). The flood took the inhabitants by in mid of the night by suprise, causing a death toll of several hundred people.

The discussion round, aiming the memorial of flood as well as future protection against such events, was supported by our 3Di Visualization system. Further information on the memorial is available as an interview of Olivier Hoes, associate professor at the TU Delft and lead scientist- and organisor of the event, an interview by TV West Nieuws of Olivier Hoes, an article in TU Delta on the visualization system and an article the TU newspage with some conclusions on the discussion.

3Di is a research programme in which the TU works together with Deltares and Nelen& Schuurmans on the development of a new generation flood simulation models.

Continue reading: Memorial of the 1953 North Sea Flood

Master Thesis Defense Ioanna Tziouvara

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:22:30 +0000

On the 14th December, Ioanna Tziouvara will defend her Master thesis: Integration of 3D tracking systems for Interaction in Spatial Augmented Reality. The defense is open for the public and guests are therefore invited to attend.

MSc Committee:
Chair, Full Professor: Prof. dr. E. Eisemann, Faculty of EEMCS, TU Delft
Daily Supervisor: Prof. dr. E. Eisemann, Faculty of EEMCS, TU Delft
External supervisor: ir. J. Verlinden, Faculty of IDE, TU Delft
Committee Member: Dr. ir. G. de Haan, Faculty of EEMCS, TU Delft

Date and time: 14 December 2012, 14:30

Location: van der Poelzaal (LB 01.220), Faculty of EEMCS, Mekelweg 4, Delft

Topic preview can be found at the project website.

Abstract:

Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) has been a research field for more than a decade.  SAR uses digital projectors to augment virtual information on physical objects, which makes it non-invasive and can yield an immersive experience. SAR has shown to have potential in a variety of fields, like entertainment, medicine and industrial applications. Although the opportunities that accompany SAR are great, effort towards the interaction mechanisms is necessary.

In this thesis, a SAR system designed and developed to be applied in the field of Industrial Design Engineering is presented. More specifically, this work contains an approach to set the hardware to support SAR, else known as hardware calibration for SAR. Each hardware entity is calibrated with respect to a common “world” in order to achieve effective communication. This world is set to coincide with the graphics world, and this allows us to imagine being inside the 3D graphics world while the virtual content is rendered onto the scene’s objects. In order to identify the basic ingredients that enable interaction in SAR, a scheme is introduced to help with the analysis of related work. Based on this background knowledge and the newly inserted scheme, we designed the interaction components of our SAR system according to characteristics of our setting. The SAR system was designed to work in the peripersonal region. The user inserts input via a constructed IR tracked pen and a dynamic menu is used as interface to the system. Functionality such as selection, feedback and annotation is enabled for interacting with the SAR system. The system’s application is divided into two parts. The first part includes the use of the RGB-D camera and the IR tracker for the construction of a 3D scanner to produce a virtual model of an object through sampling, segmentation, and registration of sequential point clouds. In the second part, the result of the scanning process, which is a polygonal mesh of the scanned object, is added to the SAR system’s application that enables interaction with virtual models and the ground level of the world. These two parts of the SAR system application aim to support industrial designers in the scanning of a freshly made physical prototype, and enable the design of features on the corresponding virtual model by using the SAR system.

In order to identify the strong points and weaknesses of the current state of the SAR system application, we carried out a user evaluation. 21 students from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering evaluated the two parts of the system’s application. The results show that the SAR system is useful and that it has great potential in the field of Industrial Design Engineering. Nevertheless, there is still space for improvement and future work, in order to be fully applied in the field.


Recent M.Sc. Defences

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:14:42 +0000

At regular intervals, we will post updates concerning recent master thesis topics and outcomes.

We’ll begin with a description of the work done by Marnix Kraus, MSc. who completed his Master Thesis in the field of active multi-camera navigation in video surveillance systems, supervised by Gerwin de Haan. He designed and evaluated a prototype system for this purpose. His findings indicate that the presented system can enhance operator performance in surveillance control rooms that monitor vast and complex areas. The full thesis can be downloaded here. More information on research related to this topic can be found on the VRLAB project website.

In the game technology department, Rick de Ridder, MSc. worked on simulating urban area development for semantic game worlds for his Master Thesis. This work was supervised by Tim Tutenel and Rafael Bidarra. In his work, he expands a semantic world-generation prototype by introducing factors like resources, events and neighboring settlements in the generation process. It extends current techniques by adding more history and meaning to the procedurally generated cities. The full thesis can be found here and additional information is available on the related Game Technology project website.

Anne van Ee, Msc. developed new interaction schemes for the touch-based organization of patent collections in her thesis work. The thesis was supervised by Gerwin de Haan and it was carried out in co-operation with the European Patent Office. Anne based her work on earlier co-operative work with the European Patent Office and improved the organization system by introducing the Local Affine Multidimensional Projection (LAMP) technique to help the user while searching for patents. If you’re interested in this work, you can check out the full thesis here.

Renata Raidou. MSc. completed her thesis in the field of medical visualization as a Biomedical Engineer. In her work she successfully researched the planning and guidance of minimally invasive cement injection to combat the effects of aseptic loosening that occur after total hip replacement surgery. This work was supervised by Francois Malan and Charl P. Botha. Renata developed an integrated system for planning and guiding minimally invasive refixation. The thesis proposes new approaches to combine CT and fluoroscopy in pre-operative planning. She conducted an extensive review with domain experts to evaluate the system. Her full thesis can be found here.

Domains

Virtual Environments offer a new potential by a more intensive experience of 3D spatial information and natural forms of interaction, to increase the understanding of dynamic spatial relationships. This intensive exposure of scientists to simulation models and data is achieved by representing these as 3D artificial worlds that are suitable for navigation, interaction, and quantification. We work on visualization algorithms, interaction techniques and supportive development tools to build flexible interactive visualization applications in Virtual environments.
Projects: PDRIVE, Cloud Explorer, iVR, IntenSelect, MolDrive, VRX

In Flow Visualisation, the research concentrates on visualisation of 3D data fields, both scalar and vector fields. Methods are developed for visualisation of 3D fields based on regular or curvilinear grids. For scalar fields, volume ray casting and hybrid rendering techniques have been developed. For visualisation of vector fields several techniques were developed, such as particle tracing, interactive probing, and selective visualisation. Also, visualisation techniques are developed for specific physical flow phenomena such as turbulence.
Projects: Interactive Isosurfacing,Feature-based Flow Visualisation,Multi-resolution Visualisation of Large Time-dependent Data Sets, Atmospheric Simulation and Visualization

In addition, people in our group also work on general graphics and visualisation problems in various other areas.

Current Researchers: Gerwin de Haan, Frits Post
External Researchers: Michal Koutek, working at KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute)
Current Students: Berend Wouda

Former Researchers: Eric Griffith Former Students: Huib Piguillet, Torsten Stoeter

Publications

Some publications that represent our work include:

  • Gerwin de Haan, Huib Piguillet, Frits Post, "Spatial Navigation for Context-Aware Video Surveillance", In: Computer Graphics and Applications, Special Issue on MultiMedia Analytics (September 2010). Entry on DOI on Computer.org, IEEE Explore, ACM Portal.

  • "Consistent Viewing and Interaction for Multiple Users in Projection-Based Virtual Reality" (pdf), Eurographics, Prague, September 2007

  • "PDRIVE: The Projector-based, Desktop Reach-In Virtual Environment",(pdf) EGVE/IPT 2007 Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments/ Immersive Projection Technology , Weimar, July 2007

  • "A Reprocessing Tool for Quantitative Data Analysis in a Virtual Environment", (pdf), VRST 2006, 2006

  • "Hybrid Interfaces in VEs: Intent and Interaction" (pdf), Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments 2006, Lissabon, 2006.

The full publications list of the visualisation group can be browsed by clicking here.

In the News

Project List

Available Student Projects

If you are an MSc. or BSc. student and you're interested in doing a project in visualisation or VR, please take a look at the available projects listed below or in the general project list. If you have a special project in mind, novel ideas on graphics, displays, cameras, Augmented Reality, interfaces, interaction or just a simple question please don't hesitate to contact either Gerwin de Haan (VR guy) or Frits Post (leader of the Visualisation Group and guru of all things visualisation).


Here is a (non-exhaustive) list with proposals for available projects:

Completed Student Projects

At several groups and labs around TU Delft, people work on and with graphics, perception, interaction and even Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality:

  • AR+RFID Lab is a collaboration initiative of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and local companies in creative industry.

VRVis (last edited 2012-06-19 11:29:50 by GerwinDeHaan)