The Designer-Workbench project aims at transforming the classical industrial modeling and design paradigm into its virtual analog using state-of-the-art three dimensional I display technology, data gloves and spatial tracking. This paper outlines the fundamental tools and design paradigms required for the implementation of this modeling envirornment and demonstrates the usablility of virual environments (VEs) for simulation of two-handed clay modeling and design tasks on the basis of non uniform rational B-spines (NURBS)

Multiresolution representations of high-dimensional scattered data is an outstanding problem in the field of scientific visualization. This paper introduces a data hierarchy of Voronoi diagrams as a versatile solution. We implemented two programs to demonstrate this, the first of which uses a constant function to approximate the data within each Voronoi tile and the second program uses the Sibson interpolant within each tile [5].

Digitization devices and scanners generate very large point sets representing complicated geometric models. Data sets typically result from multiple scans, frequently even multiple viewpoints. We discuss a method that constructs a B-Spline surface from scattered data points, usable for further processing a CAD system. The basis for our reconstruction is the decomposition of the scattered points into a 3D strip tree data structure. Our data structure is an extension of the original strip tree presented in [3]. It is similar to a quadtree, except that each node in our tree represents a bounding box whose orientation is defined by the best-fit plane approximating the data points inside the box.

Image resectioning is the process of taking 2D images of a 3D model and mapping those images back onto the model so the images can be viewed in 3-space. Consider photographic images of oil-slick tests on an airplane wing; image resectioning allows a scientist to take the image of the wing, shot at different locations and orientations, and visualize them as a continuous, 3-dimensional model. We aim to develop algorithms to automate the image resectioning problem with as little human interaction as possible. This abstract describes one of the steps toward that goal- finding points in the image and model that we can use for matching.