Point-based Modeling in VR

Assigned Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

Triangle-based rendering is still the state-of-the-art. However, for quite some time point-based approaches, directly rendering point clouds, haven been investigated. The removal of the discrete surface bears numerous advantages such as simpler approachess to modeling, LOD, animation, rendering of volumetric scans, mitigation of distortion artefacts, simple additive/subtractive manipulation, etc.

Tasks

In this work, you would create an immersive point-based modeling tool. It aims at enabling the user to quickly create vast and yet intricate worlds. The key towards this aim will be 3D cloud point brushes or 3D cloud point manipulator brushes, whereas the first would simply realise a copy and paste of well-defined 3D areas of points and the latter would be arbitrary manipulative functions/filters applied to well-specified input voxel sets. As the resultant brushes can be rather diverse, a smart way of organising and parameterising them is the next task on the agenda (a look at recent works by the GE group on inventory systems might help, i.e. Mussmann et al. 2021). PointXR may serve as a starting point for handling the data structures and point-based rendering.

Alongside these programmatic tasks, you would also setup a mathematical formula or system to evaluate the complexity of the designed world, including, for instance, measures such as the world’s dimensions, the colour space, distribution patterns and other measures of diversty, etc. By means of this set of measures alongside the respective artefacts, the effectivess of the system throughout the incremental development process needs to be documented.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg

References

[{“Alexiou, E., Yang, N., & Ebrahimi, T. (2020, May). PointXR”=>”A toolbox for visualization and subjective evaluation of point clouds in virtual reality. In 2020 Twelfth International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.”}, {“Hornby, G. S. (2007). Modularity, reuse, and hierarchy”=>”measuring complexity by measuring structure and organization. Complexity, 13(2), 50-61.”}, {“Kim, B. (2019). Virtual Reality for 3D Modeling. Beyond Reality”=>”Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality in the Library, 31-46.”}, “Mußmann, M., Truman, S., & von Mammeen, S. (2021). Game-Ready Inventory Systems for Virtual Reality. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games. IEEE.”]