2010/02/08 > eTech France 237 > A Cube for the Intuitive Manipulation of 3D Contents

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		Special Feature A Cube for the Intuitive Manipulation of 3D Contents http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/62204.htm On December 3, 2009, Immersion, a small Bordeaux-based business and leader in solutions for virtual reality and visualization, unveiled Cubtile, the world's first 3D multi-touch computer device. Thanks to touch technology, contents can be intuitively manipulated on a screen with the 27-centimeter edge cube. An appearance or a volume can be captured by merely touching the screen. An architect, for instance, could easily navigate through the blueprints of a future building. An automotive engineer could manipulate a car prototype thanks to the amazing decision-aid tool whose first deliveries have been scheduled for the first quarter in 2010. The fifteen year-old business has just advanced to a new stage. "It's Philippe Coiffet's fault if I created Immersion," joked CEO Christophe Chartier. He recalled that he had read a reference book called La Réalité Virtuelle (virtual reality) co-authored by Grigore Burdea, a researcher at the highly renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Frenchman Philippe Coiffet, then CNRS Research Director at the Paris Robotics Laboratory (LRP), who is considered as one of the world's leading specialists in robotics and virtual reality. After reading the book, Christophe Chartier decided to embark on the adventure with a friend. In 1994, virtual reality was in its infancy. A scant nine months earlier, Jaron Lanier had coined the term Virtual Reality (VR) to designate "a real-time immersive space with a realistic, tridimensional representation of an environment." Although the industrial applications of the new field were at the early stages, Immersion founders were convinced that their development would soon take off. "So we began by building a catalog of products based on all the names listed in Grigore Burdea and Philippe Coiffet's book. Our goal was to become the importers of the different emerging solutions," recapped the Immersion CEO. Three Areas of Business for a Small Firm with a Staff of 20 Immersion's catalog gradually grew apace with the flourishing market. On the eve of the 2000's, the appeal of virtual reality increased as the technology could shorten development time, anticipate industrial issues and cut design and maintenance costs. For eight years, the business was always on the lookout for the newest products and most recent solutions, thanks to an ever-alert technology watch. As a result, it built up a solid customer network. "Automaker PSA fueled our drive to go beyond our core skill, i.e., product and solution trade. When it launched its Xara Picasso model, it asked us to integrate a virtual reality solution and develop it in France and Europe," Christophe Chartier explained. The Bordeaux-based business worked on the job with American Intergraph Computers Systems and Compagnie des Signaux (CS), a French software computing and services company. Some sixty simulators were installed in France and Europe. The successful achievement spurred Immersion to go on to the next stage and make bigger investments in the intellectual field. It did so by launching European research projects such as INSCAPE, to design software and write interactive 3D stories, or CRIMSON, to engineer a system using virtual reality for the preparation, training and management of security tasks in response to urban crises. Immersion is a small business that now has a staff of about twenty people working in three business areas: Products, the continuation of the firm's original core skill, i.e., trade, Projects and R & D. The Projects team handles tailored solutions, such as stereoscopic visualization rooms, very high-density pixel image walls, multi-face immersive environments, or real-time 3D visual simulators. "The Stanley Kubrick room built for Renault is one of our striking achievements. The room, dedicated to the virtual design of car prototypes, makes it possible to visualize the car in any circumstances and simulate every balance and imbalance," Christophe Chartier explained. Immersion has another major project called CSWave. It is a virtual platform for welding training, engineering jointly with CS. To date, more than 150 simulators have been installed worldwide, mainly in schools where they optimize students' gestures, but also in businesses that want to train their personnel. The R & D team organizes a standing technology watch, is involved in European-scale research projects and designs new material solutions for interaction and visualization in virtual environments. Indeed, this is how Cubtile was created. An Answer to Current Issues "Cubtile stems for the skills and expertise we acquired when developing the interactive iliGHT table. Some fifteen tables have already been sold to different customers, including CNES, Lille INRIA, and the EADS group," recalled the Immersion CEO. Although the interactive tables are already amazing tools that give the hands a power that they had momentarily lost in the computer world, Cubtile, the luminous touch cube that Immersion has just launched on the market, is even more astonishing. It is the first intuitive multi-face, multipoint touch tool. In other words, its user no longer acts on a single surface, but on the 5 touch faces of the cube. This means easily manipulating 3D contents with more than 6 degrees of freedom and navigating in a 3D environment, regardless of data complexity. "For instance, you can affect the manipulation axes peculiar to each cube edge, carry out special effects, such as zooming or rotating with the matching gestures, and combine them so that each user can find the interactions that seem the most natural," he exclaimed. Several cubes have already been tested under partnerships with different laboratories. Certainly, this type of tool will soon find its way into different industries. For instance, in the major automakers' design review rooms, using the easy-to-handle intuitive cube should further shorten decision-making cycles. "After easy interfacing, Cubtile has proven to be an interesting intuitive 3D scene manipulation tool even for people with no computer literacy," reported Guillaume Osty, Imagery and Virtual Reality Solutions Manager, Information Systems Division at PSA Peugeot-Citroën. It is easy to image the benefits Cubtile could provide a surgeon, an architect or a designer. "It smoothly integrates today's trend: touch. It also provides an answer to current issues aiming at bring virtual reality closer to users," he added. Cubtile, which has already won the Science and Education trophy at the April 2009 Laval Virtual show, seems to have a rosy future ahead.	>> Suivant Version imprimable >> Transmettre cette info par email >> Recommander ce site à un collègue / ami >> S'abonner au eTech France >> FAQ / foire aux questions >> Conditions d'utilisation >>


	Pour en savoir plus, contacts :	IMMERSION - Christophe Chartier, CEO - Phone: +33 (0)5 57 54 17 00 - Email: christophe.chartier@immersion.fr - http://www.immersion.fr - http://www.cubtile.com	Code brève ADIT : 62204

	Rédacteur :	ADIT - Jean-François Desessard - email: jfd@adit.fr


	Origine :	eTech France numéro 237 (8/02/2010) - ADIT / ADIT - http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/62204.htm

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