EAGER: Exploring Volumetric Modeling and Design Theory for Virtual Environments

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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.