The essence of engineering design is rapid, effective, and creative change towards optimal solutions, which can be accomplished through the iterative modification of numerous design parameters spanning across multi-dimensions. To ameliorate the entire computer-aided engineering processes and enhance engineers' creativity through IT-supported tools, the long-term ambitious goal of this small-scale, CreativeIT project is to develop a creativity-enhancing virtual prototype environment that can greatly facilitate human-computer interaction through physics-based modeling of real-world objects and force-enabled haptic sculpting. The PI's strategy aims to develop a haptics-enabled platform for solid modeling, design, analysis, and relevant applications, which includes a suite of new, volumetric models for representing multi-dimensional datasets as well as haptics-based physical interactions for manipulating and managing such representations.
Intellectual Merits: The PI plans to take a unique and integrated approach that aims to incorporate within a single IT system disparate research thrusts that span volumetric, physical, and material modeling for novel data representation; geometric and physics-based algorithms for interaction and analysis; and software tools for various applications. Through a suite of theory-driven research activities, the Broader Impact of this initiative in the long run will be both fundamental and profound to the enhancement of IT tools in a wider spectrum of real applications as well as the broadening of computer accessibility by human beings via haptic interaction. This initiative promises to deliver a new approach for representing, manipulating, and interacting with volumetric datasets in common use in such downstream applications as digital engineering, virtual sculpting for synthesis/analysis, surgical training, and many more.
The technical goal of this project is to explore volumetric modeling and design theory that are of relevance to the development of virtual environments. The principal investigator of this project is Dr. Hong Qin, who is professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University (SUNY at Stony Brook). Our foci are on engineering design (enabled by Information Technologies), which is an innovative and iterative practice that consists of a variety of complex, challenging, and creative processes, ranging from conceptual design, interactive shape modeling, quantitative test/evaluation, rapid prototyping, manufacturing, assembly, to production. Our technical strategy is to develop a creativity-enhancing virtual environment that can greatly facilitate human-computer interaction through physics-based modeling of real-world objects and force-enabled haptic sculpting, thus offering novel interactive methodologies towards more creative and intuitive engineering design. In this project, we have taken a unique and integrated approach that aims to incorporate within a single IT system disparate research thrusts that span volumetric, physical, and material modeling for novel data representation; geometric and physics-based algorithms for interaction, analysis, and visualization; and software tools for various applications. The research outcome includes a new IT platform for modeling, visualizing, and interacting with CAD-based, volumetric datasets that have arbitrary topology, volumetric structure, heterogeneous material, and dynamic behavior. In the long run, our integrated environment is expected to help improve product quality, reduce product cost, and increase the creativity of design engineers. Many high-quality journal and conference publications are the immediate research results of this funded project. In the future, this initiative would help promote a new paradigm for representing, manipulating, interacting with, and visualizing volumetric datasets in common use in such downstream applications as digital prototyping, virtual sculpting for synthesis/analysis, surgical training, and much more.
