Open3D: Collaborative Editing for 3D Virtual Worlds

数字3D模型几乎用于从药物发现到建筑设计优化的所有设计和工程领域。随着新的成像技术的出现，如更先进的遥感系统和消费者3D相机，有一种新的能力来捕捉模型，既深入又广泛的细节。目前有一系列不同的软件包用于编辑3D数据，但每个软件包都有其特定的领域。如果要在不同的用户之间交换数据，那么最常用的方法是从一台机器导出文件，移动文件并将其导入到另一台机器上。这可以通过各种文件共享系统来实现，但是访问单位是本地文件系统上的文件。这就出现了多个问题：随着模型的复杂性增加，在文件中管理模型变得困难，协作编辑变得非常困难，跟踪更改变得具有挑战性。此外，在接下来的几年里，我们应该期望3D模型的尺寸和细节以越来越快的速度增长。这将受到消费者编辑和扫描工具的推动，但也将越来越多地使用商业扫描和生产的模型。我们可以从目前b谷歌地球上广泛但粗糙的城市表现，或现代电子游戏中非常详细但最终受到限制的比例模型中推断，想象模型将在未来10年内达到10^9 - 10^11+多边形的比例。有一个领域已经解决了对大型模型的协作访问：文档的Internet存储。像Wikipedia和b谷歌Docs这样多样化的系统表明，通过将存储与查看和编辑分离，可以构建非常大的信息库。在Open3D中，我们将设计必要的算法和服务，允许在互联网上托管这种规模的3D模型。然而，这样的3D模型从根本上不同于文本模型：3D模型跨空间扩展（例如2流形数据），缺乏明显的外在参数化，并且在局部细节上可能有很大的变化；而文本文档具有自然的线性顺序，使它们更易于使用。我们的观察是，虽然模型可能很大，但编辑或可视化的空间范围通常是有限的。因此，我们可以设想一个网络协议，它可以基于空间查询而不是文件访问来交换模型资产。此外，我们可以想象我们可以对该模型执行锁定和修订控制，以防止多个编辑器之间的模型状态不一致。通过Open3D独特的功能集，我们希望在用户体验干扰最小的情况下，实现统一模型的同步协作建模。通过这样做，我们希望能够实现一种新的众包努力，在几个领域开发大规模模型。特别是，在我们的影响计划中，我们的目标是创建一个伦敦部分地区的虚拟模型，以及一个开放访问的人体解剖模型。

Digital 3D models are used in almost all areas of design and engineering from drug discovery through to architectural design optimization. With the advent of new imaging technologies such as more advanced remote sensing systems and consumer 3D cameras, there is a new capability to capture models that are both deep and broad in detail.Currently there is a range of different software packages for editing 3D data but each is rather specialised to its domain. If data is to be exchanged between different users then the most usual way of doing this is to export files from one machine, move the file and import it on another machine. This can be facilitated by various file-sharing systems, but the unit of access is a file on a local file system. This presents multiple problems: as models grow in complexity managing them in files becomes problematic, collaborative editing is very hard and tracking of changes becomes challenging. In addition in the next few years, we should expect 3D model sizes to grow in size and detail at increasing rates. This will be driven both by consumer editing and scanning tools, but also increasing use of commercially scanned and produced models. One can extrapolate from the current extensive but crude representations of cities on Google Earth, or the highly detailed, but ultimately limited in scale models in modern video games, to imagine that models will reach 10^9 - 10^11+ polygons in scale within the next decade.There is a domain where collaborative access to large models has been solved: Internet storage of documents. Systems as diverse as Wikipedia and Google Docs demonstrate that by decoupling storage from viewing and editing, extremely large repositories of information can be built.In Open3D we will design the necessary algorithms and services that allow the hosting of 3D models of such scale on the Internet. Such 3D models, however, are fundamentally different from text counterparts: 3D models extend across space (e.g. 2-manifold data), lack an obvious extrinsic parameterization, and can have large variations in local details; while, text documents have a natural linear ordering making them much simpler to work with. Our observation is that while models may be big, the spatial scope of an editing or visualisation is usually limited. Thus we can imagine a network protocol that can exchange model assets based on spatial queries, rather than file access. Further, we can imagine that we can perform locking and revision control on this model to prevent inconsistent model states across multiple editors. Through Open3D's unique set of facilities we want to enable synchronous collaborative modelling of a unified model with the minimum of interference in the user experience. By doing this we hope to enable a new crowd-sourcing effort to develop large-scale models in a couple of domains. In particular, in our impact plan we target creating a virtual model of part of London, and an open access anatomical model of the human body.