Development and comparison of a full-scale car display and communication system by applying Augmented Reality Author: K. M. Chen, L. L. Chen, S. T. Shen Displays 29 (2008) Reporter: Yang Kun Ou

Purpose First, we set out to build a design evaluation environment that combines a full-scale car display and a visual evaluation system and communication in virtual design. The basic idea is to combine both AR and PDA techniques.

Reference Virtual reality (VR) techniques have been applied to vehicle design many times in the past In 1998, Purshke and his co-workers developed a more intuitive VR system for vehicle design The designer can change the color, surface structures of the car’s interior, or any arbitrary components simply by a wave of hand

Reference This system is established for the purpose of evaluating ergonomic considerations on the interior design of a vehicle by J. Fruend et al. Raczynski and the others have applied AR and PDA project on Workflow (including Workflow- Editor, Workflow Server, and Workflow Viewer)

Reference Usually through 3D Modeling or design sketches combining with texts, audio, and images to discuss the design content. But the information presented will influence the quality of communication by M.-L. Chiu

ARPDA system To display the car model, the virtual prototype is converted into wrl file format and checked by AR Toolkit The size of the virtual prototype is adjusted to reflect the real size when observed in HMD The users may walk around to observe the virtual product, which is surrounded by environment images simultaneously sent to HMD from the camera

ARPDA system There are two common scenarios for communication in the environment: one is to discuss the design in one place with many people the other is to discuss the design remotely through LAN

ARPDA system

A standard PC is used as the main device for visual computing, including the composition of pictures in AR Toolkit, the exchange of information with remote machines, and database access A PDA is used as a mobile interface device for showing the pre-rendered image, and for sending and receiving messages via wireless LAN with PC

ARPDA system

Hardware The design display/evaluation system consists of the following hardware components: the clients are two sets of HP iPAQ H5550 series PDA The PC servers are two Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06 GHz AT/AT COMPATIBLE with NVIDIA Quadro FX3000 computers with LAN (100 Mbit/s) The HMDs are two sets of SONY PLMA55 series HMD i-CAM VC USB Camera (MC-310)

Experiment We drafted four communication schemes (modes) as the design communication ways in planning the experiments Scheme one: MSN, i.e. instant message scheme two: the telephone communication scheme three: Polycom video conference Scheme four: ARPDA

Experiment PDA operating interface

Experiment User interface implementation

Experiment User control using HMD and PDA

Experiment Synchronous discussion (composite image)

Experiment Each test items will be tested eight times altogether in this experiment; the following Table 3 explains experiment results

Discussion and future work we understand that traditional telephone design communication still keeps good exactness. But because of the traditional telephone design communication’s lack of display of communication material, it is more time consuming than ARPDA

Discussion and future work The ARPDA facilitates instant 3D imaging and note taking one can record the result with least error; but 3D imaging is simulated from 2D image there can be errors under some circumstances

Discussion and future work The present development of the 3D VR car cooperative design evaluations system is difficult to exchange 3D file in real time, because of the limitation of network bandwidth