Hyve-3D: Hybrid Virtual Environment 3D

Hybrid Virtual Environment 3D (Hyve-3D) is designed to aid the first steps of 3D creation inside virtual environments via embodied interaction and collaborative (colocalized and remote) 3D sketching without necessitating complex GUI. It is implemented as an innovative and non-intrusive immersive trompe-l’oeil projection system, based on spherical panoramas. Users can interact with the 3D scene via 2D construction planes manipulated by handheld tablets that are tracked in 6DOF. Freehand sketches made on the tablets are placed on the 3D construction plane. The tablets also display an orthogonal view of the 3D scene, complementary to the perspective view surrounding the users. Hyve-3D is an evolution of the Hybrid Ideation Space developed by the Hybridlab [Dorta 2007], as an immersive collaborative design system that allowed real-time sketching over spherical panoramas.

HIS: Hybrid Ideation Space

Prior to the Hyve-3D, the Hybrid Ideation Space (HIS) was developed with the intention of augmenting analogue tools and improving the ideation process. The HIS was intended as a cognitive artefact for ideation. It put the user inside the representation, using real sketches and three-dimensional models with manual and digital actions that are output in immersive representation. This system was based on a new spherical mirror model: an inexpensive immersive projection procedure as output and a spherical image capturing method for scale models as input.

This system allowed the use of the Immersive Sketch and the Immersive Model Making techniques.

Immersive Sketching

With Immersive Sketching, the user draws with a digital pen directly on a tablet PC (a computer with integrated interactive pen display). A three-dimensional model can be used to produce a template or used as starting point for ideation, imported in the HIS software on the tablet PC. The user sketches in a normal perspective in real time, all around him.

Immersive Model Making

Using a HD camera and a small mirror-ball as input, this camera captures the deformed spherical image reflected by the mirror-ball placed at eye level of the scaled physical model and allows the user to modify the scaled model. Then, the user can see an immersive normal scale projection of the model all around him. The real-time monitored HD image is also displayed as a background layer in the HIS software.

The HIS was the subject of a Quebec TV scientific program: Le code Chastenay at Télé-Québec.

Until early in 2015, four HIS have been installed and used concurrently at the followings locations:

1) (07-2010 - 07-2015) at Design Innovation, Milan, Italy, under the supervsion of Carmelo Di Bartolo, Professor and Industrial Designer, assisted of Duccio Mauri, designer

2) (2011 - 12-2014) at Université de Lorraine - Metz, Équipe PErSEUs (EA 7312) UFR Sciences Humaines et Arts, in Metz, France, under the supervision of Prof. J.M. Cristian Bastien

3) (9-2014 - 12-2014) at the Université de Liège, LUCID - Lab for User Cognition & Innovative Design, in Liège, Belgique, under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Leclercq

4) (2009 - 7-2014) at Hybridlab, Faculty of Environmental Design and JA Bombardier building (Université de Montréal) in Montréal, Québec - Canada

as well as...

(10-2009 - 10-2010) at the Department of Architecture of UC Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Yehuda Kalay and his assistants SeungWan Hong and Kartikeya Date.

(10-2010 - 07-2011) at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst HGK Institut Design- und Kunstforschung IDK, Basel, Switzerland under the supervision of Professor Martin Wiedmer and his assistant Jan Torpus.

(10-2010 - 07-2011) at the Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik Fachhochschule Aachen, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Claudia Mayer and her assistants Peter Zymelka, Leonard Kehl and Lars Hohemeier.

(10-2010 - 02-2011) at the Université de Laval, École d'architecture,Quebec City, Canada, under the supervision of Professor Pierre Côté and his assistant Ashraf Mohamed-Ahmed.

(02-2011 - 11-2013) at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology - Faculty or Architecture and Town Planning, Haïfa, Israël, under the supervision of Professor Prof. Yehuda E. Kalay.