Karina Rodriguez Echavarria

Adaptive voids

Additive manufacturing processes have the potential to change the way we produce everyday objects. Design for additive manufacturing focuses on dealing with the characteristics and constraints of a given additive process. These constraints include both geometric and material constraints which have a major impact on the feasibility, quality and cost of the printed object. When designing for additive manufacturing, one of the desirable objectives is to reduce the amount of material while maximising the strength of the printed part. For this, the inclusion of cellular structures in the design has been an efficient way to address these constraints while supporting other application-specific requirements. These structures, which are commonly inspired by shapes found in nature, provide high strength while maintaining a low mass. In this paper we propose the adaptive voids algorithm, an automatic approach to generate, given a volume boundary, a parameterised adaptive infill primal and/or dual cellular structure for additive manufacturing. The produced output can potentially be applied in various applications, including design and engineering, architecture, clothing and protective equipment, furniture and biomedical applications.

Dual joints for 3D-structures

The increasing popularity of 3D printing is drawing the interest of the research community to the possibilities and challenges of this manufacturing method. Amongst its many uncertainties, we are concerned here with one of its certainties—that reduction of the material required in 3D printing is critical for efficiency and affordability. In this paper, we propose a solution to the computer graphics problem of, given a volume boundary, automatically defining the mesh of a low density internal structure that is 3D-printable. The proposed solution involves two steps. The first step is to define a cell complex partition for the internal space of a volume defined by its boundaries. The second step, is to apply the Skin4Skeleton algorithm, which uses the cell complex dual to produce a 3D-printable cell-complex mesh with a parametrised thickness.

Semantically rich 3D documentation for the preservation of tangible heritage

Traditionally, 3D acquisition technologies have been used to record heritage artefacts and to support specific tasks such as conservation or provenance verification. These exercises are usually a one-off as the technology and resources required are cost intensive. However, there is a recent impetus on the creation of 3D collections to document heritage artefacts which are semantically enriched by using annotations. A requirement of these solutions is the ability to support several representations of a heritage artefact recorded through time. This paper will propose an infrastructure to systematically enrich 3D shapes in a collection by using propagated annotations. In addition, it will describe the mechanisms for annotating, propagating and structuring the annotations using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. The results of this research have the potential to support heritage organisations in making their semantically rich 3D content available to a wider audience of professionals.

Parametric 3D-fitted frames for packaging heritage artefacts

Packing fragile heritage artefacts is a challenge almost all heritage organisations have to deal with when faced with the task of transporting or storing the artefacts. The packaging solution requires fitting the artefact correctly in order to ensure the protection and safety of the item; but also to be easy and cost effective to produce. Different techniques have been traditionally used, such as double boxing, padding negative spaces and cushioning braces. However, the introduction of 3D technologies for documenting these artefacts enables innovative uses of this data for packaging purposes. Hence, this paper proposes the use of the generative modelling language in order to produce unique 3D-fitted containers for packaging heritage artefacts which fit tightly the artefact, and can be made to be reusable and more durable than traditional packaging solutions. We propose to adopt an octet lattice as a low density internal structure to the proposed container. By combining the parametric package design, 3D meshes acquisition and 3D printing techniques, we present a technology based solution to the traditional problem of protecting these valuable artefacts for transportation and/or storing purposes.

3D heritage on mobile devices: scenarios and opportunities

The cultural heritage sectors interest in mobile and 3D technologies has increased in recent years. This is partly because heritage organisations have a large amount of compelling content --- much of which simply cannot be displayed in physical museums and other venues because of space constraints. Consequently, mobile technology represents an exceptional opportunity for the sector to offer innovative approaches for individuals to interact with cultural heritage assets. This paper presents visions for exploiting 3D mobile technologies in the cultural heritage sector by employing a use-inspired basic research approach based on hypothetical scenarios. These scenarios focus on different fields such as archaeology, preservation, education and tourism. Moreover, the paper examines the opportunities required to address the challenges in several research areas, including 3D technology, semantically linked data, crowdsourcing as well as privacy and copyright. Finally, the paper acknowledges the challenges involved on ensuring the business sustainability of these innovative applications.

Studying Shape Semantics of an Architectural Moulding Collection - Classifying Style Based on Shape Analysis Methods

As technologies for 3D acquisition become widely available, it is expected that 3D content will become increasingly popular. Nevertheless, to provide access and enable the creative use of 3D content, it is necessary to address challenges such as the availability of open repositories dedicated to 3D content and the automatic enrichment of 3D content with suitable metadata so that content does not get lost. To address these challenges, this paper presents research on developing technologies to support the organisation and discoverability of 3D content in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. The main contributions of the paper include an ontology for documenting 3D representations of architectural mouldings decorated with ornament. In addition, a shape analysis method to improve the information that is automatically extracted from a 3D shape is proposed. This method is tested on part of a collection of Regency ornament mouldings found in domestic interiors. This content provides a rich dataset on which to explore issues common to many CH artefacts, such as design styles, patterns and motifs.

Local-to-global mesh saliency

As a measure of regional importance in agreement with human perception of 3D shape, mesh saliency should be based on local geometric information within a mesh but more than that. Recent research has shown that global consideration has a significant role in mesh saliency. This paper proposes a local-to-global framework for computing mesh saliency where we offer novel solutions to solve three inherent problems: (1) an algorithm based on statistic Laplacian which does not only compute local saliency, but also facilitates the later computation of global saliency; (2) a local-to-global method based on pooling and global distinctness to compute global saliency; (3) a framework to integrate local and global saliency. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect salient features consistent with human perceptual interest. We also provide comparisons to existing state-of-the-art methods for mesh saliency and show improved results produced by our method.

Insourcing, Outsourcing and Crowdsourcing 3D Collection Formation: Perspectives for Cultural Heritage Sites

This paper presents three different propositions for cultural heritage organisations on how to digitise objects in 3D. It is based on the practical evaluation of three different deployment experiments that use different methods and business models for mass 3D-acquisition. These models are: developing the skills of in-house staff within an organisation, the use of external professionals and using crowdsourcing as a mechanism for developing the 3D collection. Furthermore, the paper provides an analysis of these models, lessons learned and practical recommendations for cultural heritage organisations. The analysis includes considerations of issues such as strategy, size of the organisation, skills, equipment, object accessibility and complexity as well as the cost, time and quality of the 3D technology. The paper concludes that most organisations are able to develop 3D collections but variations in the result will be reflected by the strategic approach they place on innovative 3D technologies.

In Memoriam: David Arnold (1951--2016)

Professor David Arnold, the founding Editor in Chief of ACM JOCCH, died suddenly on the evening of Tuesday, October 25, 2016, at the end of a game of Fives (a handball game), a sport he had played since at least his undergraduate days. David’s career spanned many realms. He was involved in over 45 years of research in the design of interactive computer graphics systems and their application in architecture, engineering, cartography, scientific visualisation and over the past 18 years on cultural heritage. David was the founder of the Cultural Informatics Research Group in 2002, and he remained its director until his retirement in the spring of 2016. David’s vision was of a multiand interdisciplinary research group that could provide academic research in support of the cultural heritage sector. Without any doubt, he can be considered one of the very few pioneers of this domain, contributing personally to the consolidation of visual media technologies as a main ingredient of digital humanities. David was never a lone researcher—he was always a team player and an excellent project coordinator, and he would himself doubtless acknowledge the roles of many other players in bringing an initial glimpse of a vision to the healthful state this field is in today. David was educated at the University of Cambridge and had an MS in engineering and computer science and a PhD in architecture. He subsequently spent 24 years at the University of East Anglia and 14 years at the University of Brighton. At Brighton, he was Dean of the Faculty of Management and Information Sciences and later the university’s Director of Research Initiatives and Dean of the Brighton Doctoral College, all while simultaneously being the director of the Cultural Informatics Research Group. But it was David’s impact on the cultural heritage community for which he was best known. David was coordinator of the EPOCH Network of Excellence under the EU’s Framework 6 Programme (FP6), involving 95 partners. He contributed to the creation of the VAST workshop series. More recently, he coordinated 3D-COFORM, a large-scale integrating research project under FP7. He was also past Chair of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics). In the spring of 2006, David Arnold started to develop his vision for a new journal in the area of computing and cultural heritage. David envisaged a journal that reported technical developments with a genuine relevance to the cultural heritage sector. A couple of years later, the first volume of JOCCH was released with David as Editor-in-Chief. With so many roles, David touched the lives of many. David was amazingly generous, had a huge sense of humor, and always displayed sheer kindness to others. We truly enjoyed working with him, and we will miss him greatly.

Web-based exploration of semantically rich 3D decorative ornament

The aim of this research is to document and provide easy access and exploration to 3D decorative ornament, in order to support its preservation and reuse in future products. The research focuses on the Regency style of ornamentation used to decorate different type of objects such as furniture, and, for example, in architecture. The ambition of the project is to bring this decorative art into the 21st Century by conducting research using the latest 3D access technologies as well as applying additive manufacturing technologies to its reproduction. Therefore, this paper will contribute information about the development of an accessible, web based, digital repository with semantically rich 3D ornamental shapes. This repository has the potential to make the content available to a variety of users, including art historians and designers.