From: goodman@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Marc Goodman)
Subject: Re: Comments on VR-based Architectual Design Products?
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1992 15:28:04 GMT
Organization: Brandeis University



sbrenner@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (scott.d.brenner) writes:

>[...]
>would put on headgear and actually walk through the proposed
>design.  He/she could verify that cabinets and appliances were
>easily reached and at the correct hights.  He/she could look
>out the window in its proposed location to see if the view
>is satisfactory.

>It seems to me that VR could be very useful in architectual
>design applications.  Initially, the costs would be high.
>But after the use of these systems became more widespread,
>I think the cost/benefit ratio would become appealing to most
>people considering building or redesigning a house.

For this to be really effective, it would seem to me that such a
system would need to render images with a lot of detail...  At the
very least we are talking about a model of illumination with multiple
light sources (after all, you want to make sure that the place is well
lighted), shading, shadow, and transparency (just how effective is
that southern exposure, anyway?).  In short, we are probably talking
about a fairly sophisticated ray-tracing system here, rather than just
simple constant-shaded polygons.

The implication is that hardware is just not up to the task yet.  As
far as I know, only very expensive, special purpose hardware can
render this type of detail anywhere near 30 frames per second...  Of
course, with computing power increasing roughly exponentially with
respect to time, it may only be a few decades until such technology is
available.

Another issue is how does the user get that much data into the system?
Here, I am referring to models of furniture, tables, appliances,
dimensions of rooms and positioning of windows, type of windows, etc.
It is unrealistic to expect a huge amount of data entry from someone
who just wants a ``walk through.''  Perhaps some sort of template
system, which used pre-canned models of furniture, etc. could be used,
and the user could just specify position, color, type of texture
(leather vs. cloth, and so on).

-Marc