Traditional Japanese crafting presentation system based on virtual reality and agent technology

In order for traditional Japanese crafting industries to survive in the coming new century, the introduction of sophisticated multimedia and high speed network technologies is required. The authors propose a user-friendly three-dimensional CG presentation system for a typical Japanese crafting industry based on agent and virtual reality functions. A large number of traditional Japanese fittings in a local city are redesigned by three-dimensional computer graphics into CAD data and stored in the database servers distributed over the Internet. Users can easily retrieve the desired fittings and put them into the traditional Japanese interior to design more creative and original houses, hotels and other buildings. We prototyped a presentation system using VRML and JAVA on networked workstations. A user can walk through the desired virtual space as a Japanese interior organized by various Japanese traditional fittings and interactively change those fittings by selecting from the database and replacing by simple operations. As a result, we verified the usefulness of our suggested system not only for Japanese crafting but also for worldwide design industries.