54 Informatik
This thesis suggests cooperation as a design paradigm for human-computer interaction. The basic idea is that the synergistic co-operation of interfaces through concurrent user activities enables increased interaction fluency and expressiveness. This applies to bimanual interaction and multi-finger input, e.g., touch typing, as well as the collaboration of multiple users. Cooperative user interfaces offer more interaction
flexibility and expressivity for single and multiple users.
Part I of this thesis analyzes the state of the art in user interface design. It explores limitations of common approaches and reveals the crucial role of cooperative action in several established user interfaces and research prototypes. A review of related research in psychology and human-computer interaction offers insights to the cognitive, behavioral, and ergonomic foundations of cooperative user interfaces. Moreover, this thesis suggests a broad applicability of generic cooperation patterns and contributes three high-level design principles.
Part II presents three experiments towards cooperative user interfaces in detail. A study on desktop-based 3D input devices, explores fundamental benefits of cooperative bimanual input and the impact of interface design on bimanual cooperative behavior. A novel interaction technique for multitouch devices is presented that follows the paradigm of cooperative user interfaces and demonstrates advantages over the status quo. Finally, this thesis introduces a fundamentally new display technology that provides up to six users with their individual perspectives of a shared 3D environment. The system creates new possibilities for the cooperative interaction of
multiple users.
Part III of this thesis builds on the research results described in Part II, in particular, the multi-user 3D display system. A series of case studies in the field of collaborative virtual reality provides exemplary evidence for the relevance and applicability of the suggested design principles.
Modern immersive telepresence systems enable people at different locations to meet in virtual environments using realistic three-dimensional representations of their bodies. For the realization of such a three-dimensional version of a video conferencing system, each user is continuously recorded in 3D. These 3D recordings are exchanged over the network between remote sites. At each site, the remote recordings of the users, referred to as 3D video avatars, are seamlessly integrated into a shared virtual scenery and displayed in stereoscopic 3D for each user from his or her perspective.
This thesis reports on algorithmic and technical contributions to modern immersive telepresence systems and presents the design, implementation and evaluation of the first immersive group-to-group telepresence system in which each user is represented as realistic life-size 3D video avatar. The system enabled two remote user groups to meet and collaborate in a consistent shared virtual environment. The system relied on novel methods for the precise calibration and registration of color- and depth- sensors (RGBD) into the coordinate system of the application as well as an advanced distributed processing pipeline that reconstructs realistic 3D video avatars in real-time. During the course of this thesis, the calibration of 3D capturing systems was greatly improved. While the first development focused on precisely calibrating individual RGBD-sensors, the second stage presents a new method for calibrating and registering multiple color and depth sensors at a very high precision throughout a large 3D capturing volume. This method was further refined by a novel automatic optimization process that significantly speeds up the manual operation and yields similarly high accuracy. A core benefit of the new calibration method is its high runtime efficiency by directly mapping from raw depth sensor measurements into an application coordinate system and to the coordinates of its associated color sensor. As a result, the calibration method is an efficient solution in terms of precision and applicability in virtual reality and immersive telepresence applications. In addition to the core contributions, the results of two case studies which address 3D reconstruction and data streaming lead to the final conclusion of this thesis and to directions of future work in the rapidly advancing field of immersive telepresence research.
In computer-aided design (CAD), industrial products are designed using a virtual 3D model. A CAD model typically consists of curves and surfaces in a parametric representation, in most cases, non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). The same representation is also used for the analysis, optimization and presentation of the model. In each phase of this process, different visualizations are required to provide an appropriate user feedback. Designers work with illustrative and realistic renderings, engineers need a
comprehensible visualization of the simulation results, and usability studies or product presentations benefit from using a 3D display. However, the interactive visualization of NURBS models and corresponding physical simulations is a challenging task because of the computational complexity and the limited graphics hardware support.
This thesis proposes four novel rendering approaches that improve the interactive visualization of CAD models and their analysis. The presented algorithms exploit latest graphics hardware capabilities to advance the state-of-the-art in terms of quality, efficiency and performance. In particular, two approaches describe the direct rendering of the parametric representation without precomputed approximations and timeconsuming pre-processing steps. New data structures and algorithms are presented for the efficient partition, classification, tessellation, and rendering of trimmed NURBS surfaces as well as the first direct isosurface ray-casting approach for NURBS-based isogeometric analysis. The other two approaches introduce the versatile concept of programmable order-independent semi-transparency for the illustrative and comprehensible visualization of depth-complex CAD models, and a novel method for the hybrid reprojection of opaque and semi-transparent image information to accelerate stereoscopic rendering. Both approaches are also applicable to standard polygonal geometry which contributes to the computer graphics and virtual reality research communities.
The evaluation is based on real-world NURBS-based models and simulation data. The results show that rendering can be performed directly on the underlying parametric representation with interactive frame rates and subpixel-precise image results. The computational costs of additional visualization effects, such as semi-transparency and stereoscopic rendering, are reduced to maintain interactive frame rates. The benefit of this performance gain was confirmed by quantitative measurements and a pilot user study.