Abstract :
The integration of virtual reality and computer-aided design technologies is a revolution in the history of design. Virtual environments provide more information and feedback to designers than traditional desktop systems. Such information and feedback include immersive and stereoscopic visual information, haptic or tactile feedback, and auditory feedback. The multimodal information is in general rather intuitive and inspiring to designers, resulting in globally enhanced insights, creativity and productivity. Moreover, multimodal virtual reality technology excels at the visualization of complex scene and information, which is particularly difficult in desktop systems. In this talk, we present our recent research achievements on: (1) online synthesis of multi-channel visual signals, and the construction of multimodal virtual environments; (2) fusion of graphic, image and video signals in augmented reality environments; (3) synthesis of visual and haptic signals in virtual assembly applications; (4) virtual design and simulation in multimodal virtual environments, including surface deformation based on hand gesture interface, virtual assembly with haptic interactions, virtual maintenance in augmented reality environments; (5) demonstrations and examples.
