Abstract We have proposed novel 3D virtual simulation software for breast plastic surgery. Our software comprises two processes: a 3D torso modeling and a virtual simulation of the surgery result. First, image‐based modeling is performed in order to obtain a female subject's 3D torso data. Our image‐based modeling method utilizes a template model, and this is deformed according to the patient's photographs. For the deformation, we applied procrustes analysis and radial basis functions (RBF). In order to enhance reality, the subject's photographs are mapped onto a mesh. Second, from the modeled subject data, we simulate the subject's virtual appearance after the plastic surgery by morphing the shape of the breasts. We solve the simulation problem by an example‐based approach. The subject's virtual shape is obtained from the relations between the pair sets of feature points from previous patients' photographs obtained before and after the surgery. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summary form only given. Due to globalization and increasingly competitive market environments, modern products must meet more requirements than ever before. They must not only be functional and aesthetically pleasing, but comfortable and ergonomic, as well. Consumers increasingly demand products that are easy to use and causes the minimum fatigue on the user side. Similar design elements are also becoming apparent in the design and layout of factory spaces. It is a now common for factories to adopt new ergonomic designs in order to reduce the possibility of dangerous situation and to increase the efficiency of interactions between workers and machines. These types of design activity that consider the effect of the products on the human body in the course of design are referred to as 'human-centered design'. Current CAD systems are unable to fully support a human-centered product design. Most of the research regarding ergonomic design has primarily focused on simple geometric analysis and simulation and has considered only the human model rather than the interaction between the product and the human model. As a result, it is difficult to apply the method to the traditional design process. Consequently, such designs are must be completed manually using trial-and-error iterative experiments on physical prototypes. This trial-and-error process is undesirable because it inherently requires human operators and their subjective evaluations. To overcome the limitations described above, an integrated environment that allows a simultaneous modeling of a product and a human user, simulation of both product and human behavior, and modification of the product based upon the simulation results. Therefore, the following topics will be discussed in this talk: 1. Unified environment for modeling both human body and product; 2. Human motion generation; 3. Integration with simulation software. Case study on the car interior design using the proposed approach will be also illustrated at the end of the talk.

It is becoming a common trend that many designers work on a very complex assembly together in a collaborative environment. In this environment, every designer should be able to see the whole assembly in a full detail or in a rough shape at least. Even though the hardware technology is being improved very rapidly, it is very difficult to display a very complex assembly at a speed to allow smooth interactions for designers. This problem could be solved if a designer could manipulate his portion of the assembly in a full resolution while the remaining portion of the assembly is displayed in a rough resolution. It is also desired that the remaining portion is converted to the full resolution when needed. To realize this environment, the capabilities to simplify the portions of an assembly and to reset to the original resolution should be added to the current CAD systems. Thus operators realizing multi-resolution on B-rep are proposed in this paper, They are: wrap-around, smooth-out, and thinning operator. Through appropriately applying these operators sequentially, an assembly model of any desired resolution can be easily generated. Of course, the assembly can go back to the finer resolution. In this paper, the data structures and the processes to realize these operators are described and a prototype modeling system with these operators is also demonstrated.

Given a polygonal mesh with a set of tagged control polygons, a subdivision surface that interpolates the B-spline curves of these control polygons can be obtained by constructing a set of polygonal complexes, each of which converges to one of the given curves. The construction process will geometrically and topologically disturb the initial and/or the subdivided polygonal meshes in the vicinity of the polygonal complexes. This may result in poorly shaped surfaces across the interpolated curves. Based on signal fairing, this paper describes a method to fair such a surface and paves the way to achieve further constraints such as interpolating curves with predefined tangent plane or cross curvature.

In the process of car body design, various surfaces can be generated from the given boundary curves. Depending upon the method of the surface generation and the quality of the boundary curves provided, the resulting surfaces may have global or local irregularities in many cases. Thus it would be necessary for the designer to evaluate the surface quality and to modify the surface or to use the different generation method based upon the evaluation results. This capability is very important because the defect of the surface quality detected in the production stage will require the rework on the dies and will cause a big loss in money and time. In this paper, two types of interrogation methods for the assessment of shape quality are described. One is the reflection mapping, which simulates the reflection test on the real part in the production line. This method is useful for detecting global irregularities of a surface. The other is the visualization of the curvature behavior of a surface. The method consists of traditional focal analysis, which exaggerates the mean, Gaussian and strain energy of curvature. This method makes it easier to detect local irregularities.

An interactive procedure will be derived to facilitate a designer in choosing proper actuators and their locations and optimal dimensions on each component in a robot so that the robot has the same time constant for any direction of motion and less nonlinear effects. An integrated solution of the following problems will be sought for to derive the procedure. A data structure to represent a robot in a data-base should be created. A proper objective function, which represents the dynamic characteristics of robots (i.e., time constants and nonlinear effects), has to be defined. A method of computing the objective function from a set of optimization variables should be derived. As a case study, a five degree of freedom RHINO robot will be optimized. This paper is an extended abstract because the project is still on the way.