Function-based visual and haptic rendering, interaction and collaboration in shared virtual spaces

Current collaborative shape modeling techniques could not utilize all our senses to achieve maximum immersion. Visual rendering alone is unable to convey object properties other than geometry and appearance, such as physical properties. This causes difficulties in practical modeling, and it could be solved by incorporating haptic rendering. On the other hand, traditional polygon-based modeling representation yields large files, which conflict with the limited network bandwidth in collaborative shape modeling. This deficiency could be overcome by employing memory-efficient function-based representations. A survey of the web visualization and shared virtual environments methods and tools leads to the conclusion on the active research niche for proposing new data models and frameworks suitable for visual and haptic rendering in shared virtual spaces. A novel uniform modeling paradigm of defining virtual objects' geometry, visual appearance and tangible physical properties is therefore proposed, in which these three entities are defined in their own coordinate domains and then merged into virtual objects in the application problem coordinate domain. To provide for a faster model exchange and any precision of the representation, mathematical functions and procedures are used for defining geometry, appearance and physical properties.DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (SCE