SBIR Phase II: Interactive 3-D Technical Illustrations for Science and Engineering

这个第二阶段项目的创新将开发用于创建、显示和发布交互式3D内容的工具。由此产生的技术将使教育工作者、学生、出版商和企业能够轻松地为数字图书和在线教育材料制作交互式3D插图。解决这一长期存在的内容创建问题的一种独特方法是使用基于图像的建模和渲染(IBMR)，它允许使用商用智能手机创建高度逼真的数字3D模型，而不是传统上需要的复杂专用硬件系统。在相关第一阶段项目开发的技术的基础上，这项研究的目标是：开发新的算法来创建交互插图，减少对用于创建它们的硬件的假设，开发从图像序列中提取3D几何图形的算法，并开发新的方法来捕获可用于教育背景的独特全景图像集。由此产生的技术平台将通过显著降低目前创作过程中所需的专业知识和成本，使交互式3D内容变得广泛可用。该项目的更广泛/商业影响是，通过简化创作过程并使非技术受众广泛接触到用户生成的3D内容，使其成为数字和在线教育革命的一部分。这项提案中开发的核心技术的应用领域从教育和文化遗产到消费者营销和广告。该项目还包括具体的外联活动，这些活动将使当地社区受益，同时使能够从用户生成的3D内容中受益的广大受众注意到由此产生的技术。

The innovation in this Phase II Project will develop tools for creating, displaying, and publishing interactive 3D content. The resulting technology will empower educators, students, publishers, and businesses to easily produce interactive 3D illustrations for digital books and online education materials. A unique approach to this long-standing content creation problem centers around the use of Image-Based Modeling and Rendering (IBMR), which enables the creation of highly realistic digital 3D models using commodity smartphones instead of the complex dedicated hardware systems traditionally required. Building on technology developed during the associated Phase I Project, this research aims to: develop new algorithms for creating interactive illustrations that place fewer assumptions on the hardware used to create them, develop algorithms for extracting 3D geometry from image sequences, and develop new methods for capturing unique panoramic image sets that can be used in an educational context. The resulting technology platform will make interactive 3D content widely-accessible by significantly reducing the expertise and cost currently required during its creation.The broader/commercial impact of this project is to make user-generated 3D content part of the revolution in digital and online education by simplify the creation process and making it widely accessible to a non-technical audience. The core technology developed in this proposal has application areas spanning from education and cultural heritage to consumer marketing and advertising. This project also includes specific outreach activities that will benefit the local community while bringing the resulting technology to the attention of the wide audience that can benefit from user-generated 3D content.