Research On Grid-Based Virtual Reality Environment For Collaborative Review Of Digital Mockups

Digital mockup review is an important part of iterated development forcomplex product. The more complex of product functionality and structure,the more refined divided in product manufacturing which come with thediffcult of digital mockup review and quality control. Grid-basedcollaborative virtual reality environment could provide solution for digitalmockup review of complex product. Virtual reality has been developed formore than ten years, and has been applied in more and more fields, and be animportant tools which could help designer and manufacture promote theircompitition ability. Grid computing, as an enabling technology toInternet-wided distributed computing, tracked the traditional parallel anddistributed computing, enable virtual reality to utilize resource over andprovide services to a wider extent of Internet.Focus on collaborative digital mockup review of complex machine, thisdissertation has studied resource and task management of simulation resourcein grid environment, huge data model visualization for complex productdigital mockup, collaborative interaction mode under grid qualification and soon. Based on above study, we implement a flexible and extensible grid-based virtual reality environment which can satisfy the design requirement ofcomplex mechanical product. Our focuses and achievements in thisdissertation were listed below:(1) According to the characteristics of complex mechanical product designand the shortage of present digital mockup review environment could notsupport collaborative review in dispersed location, a new extensiblearchitecture for collaborative review environment is proposed, and thecorresponding collaborative review method is also improved. The architectureconsists of private grid support platform module, service-based distributedparallel rendering module and collaborative review application service.(2) A new resource and task management model for multi-userscollaborative realtime review is proposed, according to the analysis ofresource asynchronous of grid system. The model uses a task proxy servicebased on Web Services index center to save system resources and taskinformation for resource allocation and tasks started in each grid node. Localresource management services are responsible for the registration, localstart-up and monitoring of the service process. The model is helpful topromote the agility of review and reduce the implementation diffculty ofreview.(3) A services-based parallel rendering framework was implemented.According to the requirement of mechanical digital mockup review, studied the bottleneck of complex product design and review, a new parallel renderingframework based on grid dynamic resource is proposed and implemented.According to the requirement of huge data process in real time, studied thebottleneck of distributed simulation with huge data, a multi-thread-basedparallel data process algorithm is proposed, and optimized the low detailprocess, improved the efficency of process.(4) A collaborative interaction scheme with multiple users is raised, whichscheme allow geographical dispersed users connect to a uniform virtualenvironment, and manipulate or review the digital mockup. The participatormay use various natual virtual reality interactive peripherals, such as digitalhands, positon tracking device, the normal interactive tools, for examplemouse and keyboard, are also supported. Each participator has acorresponding virtual object in the vitual environment, which object containthe name, position etc. of users and could interact with other user objects. Theinteraction mode has provided a consistent interface criterion and set up auniform interaction and management view based on user objects, which isconvenient for developer to integrate or design the new simulation tools.(5) A prototype system named VRGrid (Virutal Reality Grid) formechanical digital mockup review was developed; its case study is alsofinished. VRGrid could aggregate present idle compute resources to supportcollaborative review with huge data, which can excute the huge compute task which cannot be done with sinlge compute, as a result the resource usgagecould be advanced effectively. With VRGrid, we were designed andimplemented an application case: collaborative review service. The abovecase study has been used to verify the validity and effectiveness of VRGrid.