The Application Of Virtual Reality Technology In Interior Design

A full interior design works usually costs a designer lots of duplication of effort, but flat images and 2D drawings couldn’t represent the entire design idea explicitly. Partially because customers usually don’t get a real 3D space imagination from them, many regrets would be raised laterly without reality experiences. As CG’s developing and hardwares getting more powerful, many advanced algorithms on realtime global illumination have been invented on recent years. It’s obviously possible to practice virtual reality on PCs with GPUs plugged in nowadays.This thesis focus on two key points. One of them is how we can speed up modeling a 3D interior scene. The other is how to implement and apply interactive or even realtime rendering with global immlumination methods instead of rasterizing. Researching results in solid modeling, global illumination and realtime rendering methods are all basically practical.Starting with how to avoid wastage on unnecessary duplication of effort so that we can dramatically speed up modeling. By investigating into specific requirements for interior design workflow and how to produce 2D drawings from 3D models automatically, a method of component-based parametric modeling method is given. With help of a boundary representation based CAD kernel named OpenCascade, the first goal is achieved.Quality and frame rate must be traded off in realtime rendering. After lots of study from relative previous work, this thesis try to find a suitable way on implementing an interior scene rendering in realtime. Heavily based on another opensource project called MNRT, and with help of several powerful GPU-based application accelerators from nVIDIA Corp., including OptiX, SceniX and PhysX, a new software with commercial value is designed and implemented specially for interior design purpose.Finally parts of researching result of this thesis and a real demostration are presented to indicate benefits to interior designers, customers and design company after applying VR technology. Also a comparison to other softwares shows this new tool has its own advantages and weakness.