Exploring Aerospace Design in Virtual Reality with Dimension Reduction

Abstract

One of the today's most propitious immersive technologies is virtual reality (VR). This term is colloquially associated with head-sets that transport users to a bespoke, built-forpurpose immersive 3D virtual environment. It has given rise to the field of immersive visual analytics-a new field of research that aims to use immersive technologies for enhancing and empowering data analytics. In this paper we present a VR aerospace design environment with the objective of aiding the component aerodynamic design process by interactively visualizing performance and geometry. This virtual environment uses ideas from parameter-space dimension reduction to enhance the exploration and exploitation of the design space. We decompose the design of such an environment into function structures, present an implementation of the system, and verify the interface in terms of usability and expressiveness.

IPCP: Immersive Parallel Coordinates Plots for Engineering Design Processes

“…26 In addition, users can freely move within and maneuver in the 3D space to explore all parts of the visualization. 4 Furthermore, our system augments the pattern identification task with 3D scatter plots, [4][5][6] that can substantially aid users in isolating groups of data items that can potentially form patterns.…”

“…This is The green markers with accompanying letters are showing mapping between the action-buttons on both types of controllers. The description of user's movement in the 3D space together with interaction details can be found in Tadeja et al 5,6 a high-dimensional design space with many controllable and uncontrollable parameters. Controllable parameters include rendering parameters, such as colors and shapes, visual/auditory feedback design, interaction techniques, and choice of headset and hardware controllers.…”

“…A description of the first thereof which briefly discusses the observational user study, results of which we used to trim the vast design space, can be found in Tadeja et al 4 The underpinning VR system that included the basis of interaction techniques i.e. the gaze-tracking and racy tracing facilitated by a cross-hair was discussed in Tadeja et al 5,6 and is built based on the Unity VR Samples Pack 7 that utilizes the well-know concept of a cross-hair to simulate the user's gaze (for instance, see orange circle in Fig. 4) and Oculus Utilities for Unity 8 together with some elements from the Unity asset store packages.…”

Exploring Parallel Coordinates Plots in Virtual Reality

“…The copy of the selected items will be generated in a preconfigured fixed distance towards the direction in which the user is gazing following a tap of a button on the controller. The design and functionality of the interactive 3D scatter plots was borrowed from Tadeja et al [17]. They can be freely moved in 3D space, rotated along any of the three main axes in 90°intervals ( Figure 2) and have very basic, built-in clustering capabilities (Figure 3).…”

“…3D scatter plot[17] automatically generated out of the selected dimensions. (a) A sample of selected points in the bottom-left corner.…”