Phillip S. Dunston

Mixed Reality Benefits for Design Perception

Design visualization is key to the communication and shared perception of designs and is essential for meaningful design development and collaborations. The initial development of an Augmented Reality Computer Aided Drawing (AR CAD) system for enhancing visualization of models created in standard CAD was presented at the 17th ISARC. AR CAD features a more natural mode for changing views of the model and completely understanding the model content. Expected benefits are improved efficiency in the design detailing function, both for the individual detailer and for design collaborations where maintaining an accurate shared understanding of the design model is critical. An experimental program is under way to examine the impact of AR CAD upon a user’s perception and recall of a design model. Related experiments with desktop and immersive virtual environments have found that motion cues can indeed markedly improve spatial cognition. It is expected that we will see the same benefits in our AR CAD system, although until now such studies have not been conducted in an AR environment. This paper presents the rationale for experiments to measure the impact of AR CAD in terms of cognition cost, and it lays the foundation for further application of Mixed Reality (MR) technology to the design, construction, and maintenance phases of a facility’s life cycle. MR applications may prove promising for effective communication of designs for prefabrication, site installation, and the planning and excecution of maintenance operations.

An Immersive Virtual Reality Mock-Up For Design Review Of Hospital Patient Rooms

Full scale physical mock-ups of specific hospital units such as patient rooms are routinely utilized to serve the multiple purposes of constructors, designers, and owner stakeholders for healthcare facility projects. The shortcoming with this practice is that the mock-up is constructed during the construction phase and is of limited use for making extensive decisions regarding the functionality of the room design. Three-dimensional visualisation tools offer healthcare facility stakeholders the opportunity to comprehend proposed designs more clearly during the planning and design phases, thus enabling the greatest influence on design decision making. While several options exist, based on their experience with a bariatric patient room model, the authors promote the utilization of Virtual Reality mock-ups for design review because of their enhanced capacity for an immersive, interactive experience with the design and for the long-term utility of such models for the balance of the project life cycle.

Comparative effectiveness of Mixed Reality based virtual environments in collaborative design

This paper presents two Mixed Reality (MR) environments that provide alternative mediums that allow groups of people to share the same work and communications space in face-to-face and remote manners. Two experiments were executed to test the capabilities of the two MR systems in realistic environment and collaborative tasks against prevalent methods. Results indicated that the two MR systems significantly reduced the performance time for the collaborative design error detection task. Results also indicated less mental effort for the MR systems, suggesting that some of the mental interpretation for the error detection task is offloaded to the MR systems.

View changes in augmented reality computer-aided-drawing

A prototype augmented reality computer-aided-drawing (AR CAD) prototype aimed at supporting a design detailing and review process has been developed. Utilizing head-mounted displays, AR CAD supports users in manipulating design models with two possible view change mechanisms---observer movement around the virtual object (model) or rotation of the virtual object. Previous studies in scene recognition across views of real objects yielded performances that were better under observer movement conditions, than under object rotation conditions. Based on these studies, it is hypothesized that the perception of 3D designs in an augmented scene from the AR CAD prototype is also better when changing views by observer movement than by model rotation. This study presents an experiment to test this hypothesis, so as to address the question of the appropriate mechanisms for view change that best support the perception of 3D designs presented in an augmented reality platform. The findings from the experiment suggest that an individuals perception of 3D designs in an augmented scene from AR CAD depends, in part, on the type of view change, showing that performance was better after observer movement than after model rotation.

Tangible mixed reality for remote design review: a study understanding user perception and acceptance

BackgroundThe design review process is often expensive due to the need for face-to-face meetings between the involved parties. Distributed design collaboration is made possible by advances in networking techniques. A tangible Mixed Reality (MR)-based virtual design prototype was created as a distributed virtual environment (DVE) for the purpose of improving remote design review collaboration. This tangible MR system has been developed to a point that experimental evaluation is necessary in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various features of the system.MethodsIn this paper, we evaluated the tangible MR system against a commercial 3D distributed design review system in three aspects: the investigation of how users experienced virtual models in the tangible MR system as compared with the commercial system, the measurement of the users’ attitude towards the effectiveness of the tangible MR system, and the discoveries of usability issues involved in the tangible MR interface through usability studies.ResultsThe findings from user feedback suggest that the tangible MR system may facilitate problem-solving and the quantity of work in a given amount of time and that virtual design displayed in the mixed scene was a useful aid in the design error detection task.ConclusionThese findings are useful for the improvement of future generations of the MR system. Also the suggestions can be further generalized to become usability guidelines for the MR developers in other applications and domains.

Heavy Equipment Operator training via Virtual Modeling Technologies

Off-site and on-the-job training programs constitute current methods to train construction equipment operators. Being time-intensive, expensive, and potentially hazardous, these methods give novices only limited opportunity to experience real working conditions. Computer modeling technologies—Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Virtual Reality, teleoperation, and simulator—are envisaged to meet this challenge. To facilitate comparisons between different training schemes, a taxonomy is presented to identify distinctions. Skill transfer from the training program to real task performance is noted to be a critical ergonomics issue, and thus a cognitive-motor spectrum was developed for classifying categories of transferred skills prevalent in current equipment operator training schemas.

Better Retention of Skill Operating a Simulated Hydraulic Excavator After Part-Task Than After Whole-Task Training

Objective: We examined whether part-task training produces better learning and retention than whole-task training of a trench-and-load task performed on a hydraulic excavator simulator. Background: For complex perceptual-motor tasks that involve several components and require spatial awareness of the environment, part-task training will be effective if the benefit of being able to focus attention on each component outweighs the cost of integrating the components. We predicted that such would be the case for learning to operate an excavator. Method: A part-task training group practiced separate Carrier Positioning, Trenching, and Truck Loading modules, whereas a whole-task training group practiced the Trench and Load module, which combines elements from the other modules. The latter module, involving different scenarios, was performed by both groups immediately after training and following a 2-week retention interval. Results: Production rate on the trench-and-load task was better overall on the retention test than on the immediate test. The part-task group showed improvement on the retention test compared with the immediate test, whereas the whole-task group did not. The part-task group showed higher productivity rates than did the whole-task group on the retention test. Conclusion: Part-task training on the excavator simulator results in better skill retention than does whole-task training. The benefit of part-task training is likely to be found for other tasks requiring control of implements in various environments. Application: Part-task training can result in better retention of complex perceptual-motor skills involving several components, even when immediate transfer to the whole task does not show better performance than whole-task training.

SYSTEM EVALUATION OF A MIXED REALITY- BASED COLLABORATIVE PROTOTYPE FOR MECHANICAL DESIGN REVIEW COLLABORATION

Mechanical contractors acknowledge that the efficiency of current design review practices might be substantially improved by using 3D visualization techniques to amplify the effectiveness of the design review team. To reach this goal, the concept of a Mixed Reality-based collaborative virtual environment (MRCVE), has been formulated, which aims to support the collaborative design review process by enabling multiple parties to work on a routine task based on downscaled virtual models. One usable prototype based on the MRCVE concept is an MR-based face-to-face conferencing system, which could facilitate collaboration in face-to-face scenarios. This paper presents some results of an experiment implemented to demonstrate the capability of the system in realistic environments. The benefits of MR-based face-to-face conferencing were validated through comparison with prevalent paper-based 3D drawing review in the task of identifying design errors. The complete methodology, experimental design, experimental results and discussion are elaborated in the paper. INTRIDUCTON The cumulative pressures to reduce cost, defects, and lead-time and to improve communication with colleagues in the architecture design profession, has been that today many design professionals in this broad field engage in some computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) (Garner and Mann 2003). In addition, cooperative design based on realistic graphics has been of interest to a number of researchers and industrial practitioners, both in the area of CSCW and graphics visualization. Virtual Reality techniques put the design into a context and allow one to explore it in the form of a “walk through” by using an immersive interface. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), a concept originally used and studied for virtual environments (Billinghurst and Kato 1999), has been explored for enhancing collaboration and intuitive interaction among team members. Extensive research has been implemented in developing and testing CVEs for design collaboration (Schnabel and Kvan 2002; Torlind et al. 1999). A more cutting-edge technology, Mixed Reality (MR) is a special class of VR related technologies for creating environments wherein real world and virtual world

Virtual Visualization for the Mechanical Trade

3D CAD visualization tools provide a limited sense of the merging between design and real space and are still constrained by flat media. Furthermore, new computer interface metaphors will emerge that the construction industry should prepare to embrace. An outside-the-computer paradigm is the next step in visualization. Virtual reality and positioning technologies are converging to enable development of new visualization tools for both the design and construction phases. An experimental prototype with three visualization modes is being developed to explore virtual reality applications in mechanical detailing. This paper describes the program of research and development.

Usability Evaluation of a Mixed Reality Collaborative Tool for Design Review

Formal usability evaluation of mixed reality (MR) environments to date has received very little attention in MR literature and research. While awareness of the need for usability evaluation of MR appears to be on the rise, the techniques needed to perform efficient, meaningful usability evaluation of these environments are not yet available. This paper presents how the usability of MR system interfaces could be evaluated by using a combination of heuristic evaluation and formative user testing. This paper demonstrates by applying in assessing an MR-based collaborative virtual environment prototype for mechanical design review - mixed reality-based collaborative virtual environment (MRCVE). The evaluation was implemented through a devised experiment where human subjects were invited to use the MRCVE system for identifying design errors collaboratively from virtual mechanical models. Usability suggestions were also identified for the interface of future versions of MRCVE