Intelligent systems for interactive design and visualization

Intelligent systems for interactive design and visualization require technologies that reliably generate surface and solid models from acquired spatial data, user hand gestures and verbal instructions; and seamlessly integrate this information into the overall product design process. The deformable spherical self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is a versatile modeling tool that is able to create 3D shapes from numerous arbitrarily ordered N-dimensional data vectors. The data may be surface points on existing objects or multi-dimensional feature vectors obtained through experimental observation. The SOFM develops a topologically ordered lattice that provides information about magnitude and connectivity between neighboring vectors in the original data space. The shapes generated by the deformable SOFM can be displayed, reoriented, analyzed, and modified in an immersive virtual reality environment (IVR). This paper describes how the spherical SOFM can be used to reconstruct the shape of an existing object from measured coordinate points and be modified using shape transformation techniques for virtual 3D free-form design.