Facetons: Face Primitives with Adaptive Bounds for
Building 3D Architectural Models in Virtual Environment

Naoki Sasaki, Hsiang-Ting Chen, Daisuke Sakamoto, Takeo Igarashi

Abstract

We present faceton, a geometric modeling primitive designed for building architectural models, using a six degrees of freedom (DoF) input device in a virtual environment (VE). A faceton is given as an oriented point floating in the air and defines a plane of infinite extent passing through the point. The polygonal mesh model is constructed by taking the intersection of the planes associated with the facetons. With the simple drag-and-drop and group interaction of faceton, users can easily create 3D architecture models in the VE. The faceton primitive and its interaction reduce the overhead associated with standard polygonal mesh modeling in VE, where users have to manually specify vertexes and edges which could be far away. The faceton representation is inspired by the research on boundary representations (B-rep) and constructive solid geometry (CSG), but it is driven by a novel adaptive bounding algorithm and is specifically designed for the 3D modeling activities in an immersive virtual environment.

Video

• Facetons Video (2:17)

Publication

• Naoki Sasaki, Hsiang-Ting Chen, Daisuke Sakamoto, and Takeo Igarashi. 2013. “Facetons: Face Primitives with Adaptive Bounds for Architecture Building in Virtual Environment”. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '13). pp. 77-82, Oct. 6-9, ACM, 2013. Best Paper Award

Demo Program

• faceton.zip (java program, running on 32 bit Windows OS)
• faceton64.zip (java program, running on 64 bit Windows OS)