Towards a new approach for the description of shapes from multimodal data

The construction of a Virtual Environments (VE) requires a long iterative modeling and modification process. Depending on the final purposes, many actors can be involved both in the early conception and in the detailed specification of what has to be included and how it has to be organized. These actors may have different knowledge and expertise. It is therefore important to define tools easy usable even by nonprofessionals in order to facilitate the VE specification and setup. Such tools should allow the incomplete specification of details and the reuse of existing assets and data, either 2D images or 3D models. In this perspective, the work presented in this paper proposes a new shape description model for the management of objects and assemblies, resulting from the combination of multimodal data, together with their intrinsic properties. Based on such a model high level methods and tools directly working on components (either 2D or 3D) can be developed. Thus making easier the solution specification by the application domain experts, which can thus better integrated within the VE design process. This new shape description model is thought to be used as an intermediary model shared between the various actors in the generation process of VEs to keep the link and digital chain between them. The concepts of this model are proposed and illustrated through a first implementation. © 2013 IEEE.