A shape knowledge representation scheme and its application on a multi-modal interface for a virtual space teleconferencing system

This paper introduces recent advances in research on 3D shape ontologies. The purpose of shape ontologies is to formalize the characteristics of 3D geometric primitives so as to bridge the gap between knowledge-level representation of shapes in the human mind and their low-level computer graphics representations. In the formalizations described in this paper, an intermediate symbolic representation in the form of implicit, parametric functions is used for this purpose. With this intermediate level representation of shape knowledge it becomes possible to interactively change the “meaning” of a primitive by transforming its parametric space according to information extracted from natural language and/or hand gestures. Furthermore, “meaningful” hierarchical combinations of shapes into complex shapes also becomes possible because they can also be parameterized and thus formalized