Solution to Intricate 3D data on All Devices

If you intend to be sure that the person you are offering pictures and documents to will be able to open them on their computer, then you send them in JPG and PDF format, but what do you do with the content in 3D?

“A standardized method has not existed before now,” says Dr. Johannes Behr, head of the Visual Computing System Technologies department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD. In specific, industry lacks a way of taking the highly large increasingly intricate volumes of 3D data that occur and render them useful, and being able to employ the data on every device, from VR goggles to smartphone devices.

“The data volume is expanding faster than the means of visualizing it,” states Behr. Fraunhofer IGD is introducing a solution to such problem in the form of its ‘instant3DHub software’, which enables engineers, assemblers and technicians to employ spatial design and assembly plans without any trouble on their own devices. “This would allow them to inspect industrial plants or digital buildings, and more in real time and identify what is going out there,” explains Behr.

On considering the massive volumes of data that have to be processed, such an undertaking has thus far been either impossible or possible just with a tremendous volume of effort. After all, users have to manually select in advance which data must be processed for the visualization, a job then executed by costly special software. Not exactly, a reliable method, and an affordable method, and a time-consuming one as well. With the web integrated Fraunhofer solution, every company can adapt the visualization tools to its requirements.

The software autonomously selects the information to be prepared, by intelligently estimating, for instance, that only views of visible parts are transferred to the user’s device. Citing the example of a power plant, Behr explains, “Out of the 3.5 million elements, only the approximately 3,000 visible parts are estimated on the server and transferred to the device.”

Such visibility calculations are especially useful for AR and VR applications, as the objects being viewed at just a moment showcased in the display in real-time. At CeBIT, scientists will be showing how well this functions, using the example of car maintenance. In a VR application, it is essential to load up to around 120 images per second onto data goggles. In this way, numerous thousand points of 3D data can be transferred from a central database for a vehicle model to a device in just single second.

Technologies that form a link between CAD data and real-time production environment are also relevant for the domain of augmented reality. “Augmented reality is a core technology for industries 4.0 as it constantly compared the digital target situation in real-time against the actual stance captured by sensors and cameras” adds Dr. Ulrich Bockholt.