NSF Award
0339345
This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I research project will create a portable representational and interaction metaphor for digital media embedded in a 3D viewing environment. Currently it is difficult to organize heterogeneous digital media such as photographs, video, sound, and 3D graphics content into a form that is readily understood, intuitive to work with, and easy to exchange via e-mail or other standard data transmission protocols. The work described here will define a representational schema based on data context, data access portals, and ordered space-time paths that can be efficiently represented using the portable exchange language XML. This metaphor-known as the visual database or VDB-is generally applicable to information that is best understood in an interactive 3D visual environment such as electronic medical records and anatomical training material, maps, digital tours of 3D environments, and archival of engineering analysis. The project will also create a prototype viewer and content creation system for the VDB. <br/><br/>If successful, this project will establish a pervasive new standard for representing, interacting with, and exchanging digital media. Such a standard could improve the productivity of individuals and firms that create and communicate with 3D content. This project defines a novel metaphor for working with information that extends previous organizational metaphors such as books and web pages to support visual, 3D information. The representational schema is simple enough to be supported by small portable devices such as PDA's, and sophisticated enough to support complex human/computer interaction in a 3D visualization environment. The technology lends itself to a commercialization plan based on open XML standard and associated content viewers in conjunction with commercial content creation applications and licensing relationships.
